The crew of the US Bataan and its Marine air wing have become the Navy’s premier experts at operating the MV-22 Osprey aboard ships, mostly by making it up as they go along.
“It’s always something new, different and unexpected,” said Cmdr. Dan Olson, the ship’s air boss. “We are constantly trying to figure out stuff we don’t have published guidance for, and we’re always writing notes, e-mails off to spread what we know.”
When the Bataan Amphibious Ready Group and the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit sailed in May, they became the first ARG and MEU to deploy with Ospreys only — and none of the Corps’ old-standby CH-46 Sea Knight helicopters. Navy Secretary Ray Mabus and his entourage climbed aboard one of Bataan’s 10 Ospreys on Aug. 7 in Kuwait to experience the rocket-ship liftoff and silky fixed-wing flight out to the underway Bataan.
Olson said the ships in the ARG have become good at working the Ospreys into air operations, but unexpected things still crop up. “It can slow down operations, it’s cumbersome, it takes up more space on the flight deck than other aircraft,” he said.
Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 263 and the crew of the Bataan have added more safety observers to keep an eye on the Ospreys and the flight deck crew members who work under the cyclonic downwash from their massive rotors.
Managing Ospreys on Bataan is just one part of the challenge. The tiltrotors also must take off and land from the other ships in the ARG, both of which have much smaller flight decks than Bataan. Capt. Sara Faibisoff, an Osprey pilot with VMM-263, said the small-deck gators could accommodate two Ospreys comfortably.
“It’s not that bad at all,” she said. “You make a slow approach, put it down and there’s plenty of space.”
The main difference with landing on small-deck gators is the damage its engine exhaust does to flight decks. An Osprey’s twin nacelles blast heat downward when a V-22 is in helicopter mode. Crew members aboard the small-deck amphibs have taken to setting up metal pads, known as “hot plates,” underneath the nacelles while an Osprey’s engines are running on the flight deck.
“We touch down, they run them in, and then they take them away before we launch,” Faibisoff said.
The Osprey had many skeptics aboard this ship and in Iraq’s western Anbar province, where it deployed last year, because of the controversy surrounding the aircraft’s quarter-century of development, its high cost, and crashes that killed more than two dozen Marines.
“When we were first flying up there, people didn’t want to fly in them — they were scared,” Faibisoff said. “It takes getting used to.”
