The engine of an Marine Corps MV-22B Osprey caught fire in October during training at Air Station Miramar, California, Marine officials confirmed.
No one was injured, according to Maj. Mason Englehart, a 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing spokesman.
Three crew members from the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing’s Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 161 were aboard the aircraft during a routine training operation at approximately 4:30 p.m. on Oct. 14 when the mishap occurred, Englehart told Marine Corps Times.
Englehart told Marine Corps Times that 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing is investigating the mishap, which Coffee or Die Magazine first reported.
“We have not determined the total cost of this mishap,” Englehart wrote in a statement to Marine Corps Times. “Because this mishap is currently under investigation we cannot provide additional information.”
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The incident caused “significant burn damage” and was designated as a Class A mishap, meaning it involved at least $2.5 million in damage, according to Naval Safety Command.
The engine had caught on fire during short final — the last leg of the flight, in which an aircraft is at a very low altitude and nearing the runway — according to Naval Safety Command.
The Osprey takes off and lands vertically like a helicopter but can fly forward like an airplane by tilting its rotors.
Since its first prototype flights in 1989, the Osprey aircraft has been involved in several high-profile mishaps, leading to 51 deaths.
In June, a 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing Osprey crashed in southern California, killing five Marines.
An Osprey crash in Norway in March killed four Marines, in an accident that investigators later attributed to pilot error.
Despite the high-profile tragedies involving the aircraft, statistics provided by the Corps to Marine Corps Times in July show that the Osprey actually has a lower mishap rate in the past decade than several other Marine aircraft, including the F-35B fighter jet and the F/A-18 Super Hornet.
As of July, the 10-year average mishap rate for the MV-22B Osprey was 3.16 per 100,000 flight hours, Marine spokesperson Maj. Jay Hernandez told Marine Corps Times at the time. That’s barely higher than the total Marine aircraft mishap rate of 3.1 per 100,000 hours.
In August, Air Force Special Operations Command grounded its fleet of 52 CV-22 Ospreys over a clutch problem, while the Marine Corps did not.
The Corps has known about the issue with hard clutch engagement since 2010, and has trained its pilots how to respond when such emergencies happen, Marine Corps spokesman Maj. Jim Stenger said in a statement to Defense News.
Irene Loewenson is a staff reporter for Marine Corps Times. She joined Military Times as an editorial fellow in August 2022. She is a graduate of Williams College, where she was the editor-in-chief of the student newspaper.
