Its bigger, its more expensive, it must be better right?

Several days ago the US Marine Corps unveiled its newest and apparently most useless piece of military equipment. For years the Marines have been flying and maintaining a fleet of aging helicopters that have no doubt served them well and been a cost efficient use of funds. However with the urge to have new toys, they are unveiling the V-22 Osprey, a half airplane, half helicopter monster that costs 80 million dollars.
In what has been a 25 year process of the Marines developing an aircraft that they can call their own, all with a budge so far of 40 billion dollars and an allotted budget of 54.6 billion dollars, all while the helicopter has been working fine for years. Now I’m not one to have a problem with the military making advances in technology, it’s the way things go and has helped keep this country as it is.
However, in the testing of the V-22 to this point, 26 Marines have lost their lives as well as 4 other individuals and many other accidents not involving losses of life related to fires and engine failure. It is an aircraft that has numerous flaws, the main problem being its propellers causing it to get caught in its own turbulence during landing which results in the plane/copter rolling over on landing and heading into the ground. It also in many cases cannot land but have to land troops with a rope ladder because the propellers can cause a brown out because of all the dirt kicked up.
The other problem is that even though it can attain much higher speeds than a helicopter it must lowers it speed immensely to land, going as low as 8-9mph which exposes it to much more fire. It also does not have the ability of a helicopter to make evasive maneuvers necessary in combat actions due to its unwieldy prop design or to perform a hard landing.

“Should the V-22 lose power, it can not “autorotate” like a helicopter and allow the updraft of air to rotate its propellers for a hard, but survivable, landing. Because of this, according to the 2005 Pentagon report, emergency V-22 landings without power at altitudes below 1,600 feet “are not likely to be survivable.”

As a result the V-22 osprey has been classified by the pentagon as “suited only for low- and medium-threat environments” and is not “operationally effective” in high threat environments like Iraq and Afghanistan which we have today.
Reports by the pentagon also indicate that the V-22 does not have adequate space to carry 24 marines as it is supposed to and that the windowless cabin can promote airsickness and that leg numbness can also occur.
The Marines counter that it can fly higher and faster than a helicopter and in situations of wounded evacuation claiming that it can save vital time during the “golden hour” following injury. The downside of this is that if it has to go 8 miles an hour to land chances are you are still in trouble once you’re in and taking off. Its pluses are that it can fly five times as far and carry three times the payload.
For further evidence of what a bad idea this is the war hawk of all war hawks, Dick Cheney 4 times as the secretary of defense of George H.W. Bush tried to cancel the funding for the program but was stopped by congress.

Here is one last ringing endorsement from the pilot of a V-22 Osprey.

“Safety is a big issue,” wrote one V-22 crew chief, in a questionnaire filled out for the Pentagon’s 2005 operational evaluation. “If we had went down in the water we would have most likely lost at least 24 troops because of restricted egress. I felt like I was in a coffin.”

That sounds like the type of aircraft I want to fly in, sign me up!