Posted : Monday Nov 29, 2010
The Air Force’s hybrid helicopter-airplane is only five years old but spends almost as much time on the ground as it does in the air, maintenance figures show.
The CV-22 Osprey ended fiscal 2010 with a mission-capable rate of 54.3 percent. On any given day, from Oct. 1, 2009, to Sept. 30, half of the special operations tilt-rotor aircraft couldn’t fly their full range of missions. The Osprey’s fiscal 2009 mission-capable rate was 50.1 percent, the lowest ever.
Only the RQ-4 Global Hawk and two aging aircraft, B-1B Lancer and the C-5A Galaxy, had worse mission-capable numbers, according to the data.
The RQ-4 had a mission-capable rate of 41.64 percent. The B-1B, operational since 1986 and with a notoriously complicated hydraulics system, had a mission-capable rate of 43.82 percent. The C-5A, the massive transport first delivered during the Vietnam War, had a mission-capable rate of 52.6 percent.
