RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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A staple of the skies during the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Marine Corps’ MV-22B Osprey began its final chapter in service on Tuesday with the delivery of the last model.
With the acceptance of the 359th — and final — tiltrotor aircraft, the Marine Corps marked the end of the MV-22B Osprey program of record, a milestone that will now shift efforts towards “sustaining and modernizing the fleet for decades to come,” the V-22 Joint Program Office, which manages the Osprey program, said in a statement.
“The MV-22B ... fundamentally changed the way the Marine Air-Ground Task Force generates combat power,” Lt. Gen. William Swan, the Marine Corps’ deputy commandant for aviation, said in the statement. “It provides commanders with decision space that only speed and reach can provide, connecting ships, bases and distributed forces in ways previous generations could only imagine. Today, Marine commanders build operations around the assumption that the MV-22B will be there.”
Though the Navy and Air Force also use variants of the Osprey, the Marine Corps maintains the majority of the fleet.
The Corps intends to keep the Osprey operational through 2055 with efforts that include improving wiring, working towards pro-rotor gear boxes, standardizing the fleet and redesigning parts of the aircraft for better safety.
The aircraft has a history of safety issues and accidents that have led to the deaths of over 60 service members since 2000, according to prior Military Times reporting , and in 2023, the Defense Department grounded the aircraft after eight service members were killed when an Air Force Osprey crashed.
A 2025 government watchdog report found that the services had not appropriately shared information about Osprey issues amongst each other.
The Osprey was developed to reduce the gap between rotary-wing and fixed-wing aircraft. Since going operational in 2007, the platform has been involved in 114 deployments and flown more than 683,300 hours, according to the program’s office, which also said the Osprey represents three quarters of all Marine Corps rotary wing support.
The Osprey is produced jointly by Bell and Boeing and according to a Wednesday release from the companies, has been involved in various high-profile missions, including the ongoing Venezuela earthquake response, the 2022 earthquake response in Haiti, operations to defeat ISIS in Iraq and Syria, and the rescue of Capt. Richard Phillips in 2009 after his ship was hijacked by Somali pirates.
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