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Lack of autorotation

Take, for instance, the lack of an autorotation capability. If a helicopter loses its engines and begins to fall, the upward push of air on the unpowered rotor blades keeps them spinning fast enough to bring the bird down in a jarring, but survivable, landing. That's autorotation, a standard requirement for helicopters. But the Osprey can't do it, which Time considered a flaw.

But as Marine officials note, the Osprey is not a helicopter. The hybrid, "though worse at autorotation than most helicopters, also has a glide landing capability that no helicopter possesses," wrote Maj. Eric Dent, the Corps' aviation spokesman, in an information paper about "inaccuracies" in Time's article.

The Osprey has unusually thick wings, which give the aircraft lift at very low air speeds and allow it to glide at speeds as low as 40 knots. A hovering Osprey doesn't need to fully convert to airplane mode to leverage this advantage. A small tilt on the nacelles does the trick, allowing the bird to glide to the ground as well as, if not better than, other fixed-wing aircraft, Walters said.

The autorotation wording was dropped from the requirement in 2004 when Corps officials changed it to say only that the Osprey must perform a survivable emergency landing in the event both engines are lost.

Time described the change as a failure by engineers to rewrite the laws of physics.

Weaponry

Then, there's the issue of defensive weaponry. The Ospreys that media reports say are now operating in Iraq, all with Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 263, are equipped with M240G medium machine guns pointed out the back ramp, ready to spray hundreds of 7.62mm bullets into a hot landing zone.

Retired Gen. James Jones, former commandant of the Marine Corps, told Time he'd always wanted the Osprey to have a forward-mounted gun, a .50-cal. under the nose - something he never pulled off as the Corps' top Marine.

Jones believes all assault support aircraft should have forward-facing weaponry, according to the article. He described it to Time as a fundamental belief stemming from his Vietnam War experience: Biggest and baddest is best. A spokesman from Jones' office said the retired general was unavailable to comment for this article.

The Time article quoted Jones as saying, "A rear-mounted gun is better than no gun at all, but I don't know how much better." But Walters said the Osprey's rear machine gun is the same weapon system the Corps has in every assault support aircraft, none of which have guns facing forward.

Over the past five years, side gunners firing from CH-46 Sea Knight and CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopters in Iraq and Afghanistan "found that most of the threat was on the ramp," Walters said. He said Jones wasn't the only Marine to stand by a forward gun on principle. "It's an emotional issue for a lot of people," Walters said. "I can come up with a scenario where it would be valuable, but we haven't seen it in five years of combat."

That doesn't necessarily rule out more firepower in the future, though. The Marine Corps has already allocated funds to pursue a forward-firing, "all-quadrant gun," Walters said. A prototype of such a weapon was displayed last week at the Modern Day Marine Expo in Quantico, Va. That weapon, the Remote Guardian System developed by international defense contractor BAE Systems, could be hard-wired into the Osprey's avionics and deliver accurate, sustained fire throughout the entire flight envelope, according to a corporate release.

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