The military will be resuming V-22 flights with the understanding that “catastrophic failures due to inclusions is as high as seven per million flight hours”—compared to the standard of one per ten million hours on conventional aircraft.
Is the Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey a safe aircraft? The very fact the question has been asked so often, and with such urgency, is not a good sign. The V-22—presently in use with the U.S. Air Force, Marine Corps, and Navy—has suffered numerous high-profile accidents resulting in loss of life, raising serious questions about the aircraft’s ability to perform safely.
Problem After Problem for the Osprey
In a 2025 article on The Air Current, a publication that focuses on air safety reporting, the V-22 was said to “continue to face a “serious” risk of catastrophic failure due to flawed transmission gears even after the implementation of new risk mitigation controls involving manufacturing improvements and flight hour thresholds for the tiltrotor, according to a nonpublic system safety risk assessment by Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR).” In other words, the Osprey’s problems do not seem to be resolved.
The entire Osprey fleet was grounded late last year after a near-crash in New Mexico, where a V-22 with an engine loss was forced to make an emergency landing at Cannon Air Force Base. Notably, the near-crash bore a striking resemblance to an Osprey crash that did occur in late 2023 off the coast of Japan—a crash that killed eight U.S. servicemembers.
“The crew in the Cannon flight reportedly received warnings similar to those in the previous tragedy, but lessons learned from the incident may have aided their decision to quickly land the Osprey and survive,” The Defense Post reported.
Still, NAVAIR decided to ground the entire Osprey fleet “out of an abundance of caution.”
The Osprey’s Cursed Reputation
The Japan crash was hardly the first to result in the loss of life. Four Osprey crashes between March 2022 and November 2023 resulted in loss of life. Since the V-22 first flew in 1989, the tiltrotor aircraft has been involved in crashes that have caused 60 fatalities and 93 injuries—an atrocious safety record.
The recent near-crash in New Mexico was found to be the result of “failure of a critical gear due to an inclusion—an impurity in the X-53 steel alloy used to make the gears that creates a weak point in the metal,” according to The Air Current. It noted that “a similar inclusion-related gear failure was responsible for the November 2023” Japan crash.
Unfortunately, the risk of inclusion continues to be a problem. The military will be resuming V-22 flights with the understanding that “catastrophic failures due to inclusions is as high as seven per million flight hours.” And although improvements are planned for the gear manufacturing process, the improvements are unlikely to drop the incident rate below “the threshold of one per million flight hours that is used to categorize serious risk.”
Bear in mind: the military safety standard for an airworthiness certification is typically that no more than one catastrophic failure occurs per every 10 million flight hours. That means the V-22 is nowhere near meeting the military’s own safety standards.
So, to answer the original prompt of this article: no, the V-22 is not a safe aircraft.
About the Author: Harrison Kass
Harrison Kass is a senior defense and national security writer with over 1,000 total pieces on issues involving global affairs. An attorney, pilot, guitarist, and minor pro hockey player, Harrison joined the US Air Force as a Pilot Trainee but was medically discharged. Harrison holds a BA from Lake Forest College, a JD from the University of Oregon, and an MA from New York University. Harrison listens to Dokken.
Image: Wikimedia Commons.
