Braxton Taylor
Military officials have refused to say whether they’re still working with a company responsible for making the gear that failed on an Air Force V-22 Osprey aircraft and led to the deaths of eight airmen last year, despite long-running questions over the quality of the part and allegations of the manufacturer using lower-quality steel.
Internal Air Force safety reports reviewed by Military.com in August found that the failure of a single high-speed planetary pinion gear — the cause of the deadly November 2023 crash in Japan — was “similar to those seen on seven previous failures” going back to 2013. Those earlier failures occurred in gears made of the same metal.
More than a decade before those incidents, Universal Stainless, the company responsible for manufacturing the gear that fractured on the Osprey in Japan, was sued in 2001 for allegedly producing defective steel that went into civilian aircraft engine crankshafts, according to court records.
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“Universal falsely represented and certified its quality program so that customers would buy Universal steel,” the lawsuit, filed in a Pennsylvania court, alleged.
The 2001 case, which was ultimately settled out of court, is an even earlier indication that Universal Stainless had issues producing quality aircraft parts to specification.
Hunterbrook, an open-source investigative journalism and financial news source, published a deep-dive into the long-ranging issues with Universal Stainless last month, including the first mention of the 2001 lawsuit.
The Osprey manufacturer, Bell Flight — the company that oversees the joint partnership of Bell and Boeing’s V-22 program — and the military refused to tell Military.com whether Universal Stainless is still making components for the aircraft or what improvements have been made to prevent more issues, despite the 2001 lawsuit, internal knowledge of prior failures of Universal gears, and the deadly mishap that stemmed from the gear failure last year.
Universal Stainless did not return a request for comment.
‘That’s Glaring’
In the months after the deadly crash of the Air Force Osprey, which belonged to Air Force Special Operations Command and flew under the call sign Gundam 22, a pair of investigations found that the aircraft was brought down by the fracturing of the gear into five large pieces, which caused other failures in one of the two gearboxes that provide power to the Osprey’s twin proprotors.
One of the investigations, the internal Safety Investigation Board report, found that the failure was due to the gear being manufactured with bits of material — non-metallic inclusions — that aren’t part of the metal alloy, which eventually formed the starting point for a crack.
This mode of failure was “similar to those seen on seven previous failures in low-speed planetary pinion gears.” The low-speed gears sit next to the same gear in the proprotor gearbox that failed in Gundam 22 and are made from the same alloy.
The office in the Pentagon that oversees the Osprey was made aware of the issue in 2014, according to the investigation.
Bell and Boeing, the two companies that work jointly to build the aircraft, sent the Osprey Joint Program Office a formal risk assessment titled “Gear Metal Raw Material Impurities” that laid out the risks but, according to the Air Force internal investigation, the notice “did not adequately assess risk of high-speed gear failure.”
While Universal Stainless is one of three contractors that make gears for the aircraft, the Air Force’s investigation noted that it “supplied a significant proportion” of the metal that is used in the Osprey’s gearboxes.
Furthermore, when the Osprey Joint Program Office — part of Naval Air Systems Command, or NAVAIR — received that notice it did not fully process it to determine whether the risks it outlined would just be accepted by the military or somehow mitigated.
It is not clear from the Air Force investigation why that did not occur, and NAVAIR refused to answer Military.com’s questions on the topic in August, citing the “privileged” nature of the Air Force investigation.
The Air Force investigation did say that, in the wake of that risk assessment, “NAVAIR implemented contractual financial withholds in hope the contractor would correct deficiencies in the [alloy] processing that had resulted in previous gear failures.” But investigators found that the measure didn’t work and the metal continued to be flawed, “suggesting contractual financial withholds did not prompt corrective actions.”
Retired Col. J.F. Joseph, a Marine Corps pilot and aviation expert witness, told Military.com that it would be notably concerning if the issue with the gears and alloys had been identified in the past and no action was taken.
“If in the safety analysis, in the previous mishaps, a deficiency in production or quality in production or in terms of materials used were identified at some point that could contribute or cause a mishap, and there was not a remedy taken, that’s glaring,” Joseph said.
‘Defective Steel’
The 2001 lawsuit against Universal Stainless was brought by an aviation company called Teledyne Technologies that made aircraft engines for civilian aircraft. According to a Teledyne filing in the case, it brought the suit because Universal’s defective steel resulted in crankshaft failures which, in turn, damaged the rest of the engine.
Teledyne said in its filing that it was forced to recall the part — more than 200 crankshafts — and replace them at its own expense at a cost of around $1.7 million.
“Of the crankshafts made from Universal steel that were returned pursuant to the recall and subsequently tested, approximately 92-93% were found to be made from defective steel,” the court filing alleged.
A key contention in this lawsuit was the fact that Universal not only falsely certified the alloy as meeting specifications when it didn’t, but that it wasn’t even conducting the checks to know itself.
Teledyne lawyers said they learned through depositions that Universal had a standards manual. However, according to them, that manual laid out rules “that in reality did not exist, the regular performance of internal audits that were in reality never conducted, and purported compliance with certain military and industry specifications that were not complied with by Universal.”
Citing a deposition with Universal’s then-director of technology, Teledyne said that
“after months of continuing to produce defective steel, [Universal] ‘got better’ at making” the aviation-grade alloy, but “while Universal was ‘getting better,’ the steel it was producing was, among other things, being made into airplane engine parts.”
The suit said that investigations found that Universal kept this problem from its board of directors, the company’s quality managers, and customers. It went on to note that this secrecy “prevented customers … from having the opportunity to conduct appropriate tests” that would have discovered the defect and allowed them to take appropriate action.
Moving forward to present day, the Air Force’s internal investigation made similar allegations of shoddy and slapdash manufacturing processes against Universal.
Air Force investigators said they compared the work of Universal against Carpenter Technology — a company that made some of the other gears in the proprotor gearboxes.
“Better incoming material quality and control, tighter inspection requirement, and on-site metallurgy support at Carpenter increased the likelihood of identifying and removing non-metallic inclusions from finished products more so than the process at Universal,” the investigation found.
Moreover, investigators noted that Carpenter had voluntarily implemented a better testing procedure to detect non-metallic inclusions in its alloy, while Universal did not.
‘Very Complex System’
Despite Air Force Special Operations Command’s own investigative findings, Lt. Gen. Michael Conley, its top leader, told reporters at the Air and Space Forces Association’s conference outside of Washington, D.C., in September that he didn’t believe the November 2023 crash was caused by a bad part that Bell-Boeing should have manufactured better.
“I don’t think it was poor material,” Conley said at the time. “I don’t think it failed before its time. I think a proprotor gearbox is a very complex system with parts moving very fast.”
When asked this month whether Conley still stands by his statement after the issues with Universal Stainless went public, an AFSOC spokesperson said he stands by his comments.
However, the command declined to answer whether Universal Stainless is still supplying parts for the V-22 program.
Military.com also reached out to NAVAIR and Bell for this story with a host of questions raised by the lawsuit and its internal investigations.
After more than a week, NAVAIR refused to answer a single question, including whether Universal Stainless is still making parts for the Osprey.
Bell didn’t address any of the questions relating to the lawsuit or the issues it raised. A spokesman argued that since the company was not involved in that litigation it wouldn’t comment.
“Bell Boeing work very closely with the Joint Program Office to identify and address potential future issues, and we have done so since the beginning of the program,” the spokesman said.
The spokesman also refused to say whether Universal Stainless is still making Osprey parts.
Joseph, the former Marine Corps pilot and aviation expert witness, told Military.com that if a part was identified as not being up to standards, it’s paramount that the service is transparent about how it has remedied the issue, especially on an aircraft as complicated as the Osprey.
“It’s like a recall on a car,” Joseph said, describing his analogy as a gross oversimplification but an apt one. “It’s no different than that other than this can really kill somebody with something with so many moving parts like a V-22.”
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