Congress' probe into the safety of the military's V-22 Osprey last summer following multiple deadly crashes has been stalled for nearly a year, angering Gold Star family members who lost loved ones aboard the aircraft.
A Republican-led House Oversight and Government Reform panel held a hearing in June questioning Vice Adm. Carl Chebi, the head of Naval Air Systems Command, and other defense officials about the more than 50 service members’ lives claimed during training missions on the controversial tiltrotor aircraft.
At the end of that hearing, then-subcommittee chairman Rep. Glenn Grothman, R-Wis., disappointed in the lack of answers for grieving families in attendance, said: "I don't even want to drop this thing today." Nearly a year later, there's still no new information to report from Congress.
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A month following the hearing, Grothman and Oversight committee chairman Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., wrote a letter to the Department of Defense threatening to subpoena Osprey crash data and documents that were not provided to the committee. Military.com learned the committee never subpoenaed the information and claims the department under former President Joe Biden's administration was not being transparent.
"The Biden administration stonewalled the committee's investigation into Osprey crashes, and we plan to follow up with the new administration," a Republican aide on the committee said, speaking on condition of anonymity to explain the latest in the investigation.
Sydney Maingot, a spokesperson for Grothman, said the lawmaker was going to continue his investigation into the issue but similarly claimed "the Biden administration chose not to be transparent with us," adding there were hopes that the Department of Defense would be more forthcoming with information under President Donald Trump's administration.
"While Rep. Grothman no longer chairs that subcommittee, he is going to seek further information on this topic in the near future," Maingot said. "The new administration has been more forthcoming on a variety of topics, and hopefully this will be one of them."
Some Democratic members of that subcommittee, including ranking member Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., and Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass. -- both of whom made remarks during the hearing -- did not respond to multiple requests for comments about the status of the Osprey investigation or questions about Republican committee members' claims.
The defense secretary's office refused to address the stonewalling allegations, simply telling Military.com that "as with all congressional correspondences, the department will respond directly to the authors."
Meanwhile, the Navy -- the service that oversees Naval Air Systems Command, or NAVAIR, which determines whether the V-22 Osprey is fit to fly -- says it is "engaged with Congress on V-22 safety" and continues to "conduct congressional briefings and meetings to ensure full awareness of program progress."
Two defense officials who are familiar with the Navy's efforts on Osprey safety say NAVAIR is working on multiple inquiries from Congress on the Osprey.
However, the officials expressed some frustration with the situation, noting the letter from Comer and Grothman asked for data -- the crash safety investigations -- that the Pentagon considered "privileged safety information" it was never going to release.
"Safety investigations are designed to maximize the fullest transparency possible with those who are participating in the investigation so we can maximize our opportunity to understand what went right and what went wrong," Peter Belk, a top Pentagon official, told Congress in the hearing last year.
Belk went on to say that those safety investigations inform the more public "command investigations," which are sometimes made public and can be shared with Congress.
However, Military.com discovered the more restricted safety investigation can also contain important details that do not make it into the more public documents.
When Military.com reviewed the privileged safety investigation into the crash of an Air Force Osprey off the coast of Japan in 2023, it was revealed that the gearbox failure that brought down that Osprey similarly failed in 2013 and warnings related to that part failure were brought to the Pentagon a year later. Plus, serious manufacturing issues plagued components in the gearbox for years.
One of the officials who spoke with Military.com acknowledged there is room for the Navy and NAVAIR to be more transparent on broad systemic issues that have raised questions about the aircraft's safety, but many of the demands for transparency are also not for them to answer.
Specifically, the official noted the more public command investigations are held by the individual services and are for them to release.
However, the services often look to blur the distinction between themselves and NAVAIR. The Navy command has been brought in to answer questions alongside the Air Force and Marine Corps for several of the last few major Osprey crashes.
The Air Force and Marine Corps also routinely direct questions about the Osprey to NAVAIR.
The official called this dynamic "convenient" for the services.
Caught in the middle of the bureaucratic wrangling and months of silence on the Osprey's issues are the families who lost loved ones to the growing number of deadly mishaps. They have been looking to Congress and the military to bring them a sense of closure by solving the aircraft's issues.
Amber Sax, the wife of John Sax, a Marine Corps pilot and one of five who lost their lives in an Osprey crash that stemmed from a so-called "hard-clutch engagement" in the summer of 2022, told Military.com she was outraged and disappointed by the news.
"I'm beyond disappointed, to say the least, that these oversight efforts seem to have stalled or disappeared," she told Military.com on Monday.
"Those in power have a responsibility to share that urgency, like it's their own spouse or child flying onboard -- that's what they owe our service members and surviving families," she added.
Sax, along with the other family members of the flight that killed her husband and four other Marines, filed a wrongful death lawsuit last year against the companies that manufacture the tiltrotor aircraft, claiming that unaddressed flaws are responsible for the incident.
Similarly, the family of one of eight airmen killed during a training mission on Nov. 29, 2023, when an Air Force CV-22 Osprey, call sign Gundam 22, crashed off the southern coast of Japan after a mechanical issue, also filed a wrongful death lawsuit last year.
Military.com, which was the first to report the cause of the November 2023 crash and exclusively reported on the internal safety board investigation findings, was cited in the suit.
Most recently, in November, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Richard Neal, all Massachusetts Democrats, sent a letter to the Department of Defense asking for the safety investigation board report that Military.com reported on and for more detailed information into the military service branches’ response to the crashes.
Spokespeople for Warren, Markey and Neal did not immediately return a Military.com request for comment asking whether they ever received answers from the Pentagon following their letter nearly six months ago.
In 2022, the Air Force grounded its Ospreys after hard-clutch engagements, where the gearbox essentially shreds itself from the inside due to a power imbalance in the engines, caused issues with their CV-22s, including one instance where an aircraft was forced to land in a remote nature reserve in Norway. They were back in the skies two weeks later with no long-term fix.
A double hard-clutch engagement was the cause of the five Marines' deaths in 2022. In August 2023, another Marine Corps Osprey crashed in Australia killing three aboard; a subsequent accident investigation report blamed "pilot error" but also pointed to "several concerning maintenance practices," adding it should not have been certified as safe to fly that day.
Following the deadly Air Force Osprey crash in Japan in 2023, the military barred all Ospreys from most flights as they investigated the cause of that mishap. The V-22 Joint Program Office has not revealed what fix has been made to prevent a similar type of incident.
There were also restrictions put in place for flying the Osprey, such as not being able to operate at long distances without having a suitable place to land in case of an emergency.
Notably, the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps, all grounded their Ospreys again in December for another unknown parts issue after an Air Force Special Operations Command CV-22 had a precautionary landing during a training mission in New Mexico. Later that month, the Ospreys were allowed back in the skies.
Chebi, the head of Naval Air Systems Command, said during the subcommittee hearing in June that he did not expect the Osprey to return to unrestricted flight until "mid-2025." Marine Corps Col. Robert Hurst, the head of the V-22 Joint Program Office, told reporters at the Modern Day Marine conference in Washington, D.C., last month that he did not expect full unrestricted flight until 2026.
Air Force Special Operations Command is still operating under NAVAIR flight restrictions, Lt. Col. Rebecca Heyse, a spokesperson, told Military.com in an emailed statement, but added that fleet readiness is consistent with that prior to the Japan crash in 2023. Additionally, Heyse said updated gearboxes would be distributed to the fleet this summer.
Despite the recent groundings and crashes, Air Force Special Operations Command has continued to express confidence in the aircraft.
"Since it entered operations almost 20 years ago, the CV-22 has performed admirably and accomplished critical missions," Heyse said, adding it's ideal for missions in the Indo-Pacific. "We believe the best years for the platform are still ahead."
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