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Ospreys start to fly, but most still grounded

Roughly two to three weeks will pass before all of the Defense Department’s V-22 Ospreys will be back in the air after the fleet was grounded last week, a program spokesman said Tuesday.

The tilt-rotors were grounded Feb. 6 after a fault caused by a computer chip in the aircraft’s flight control computers was discovered during pre-flight testing at the Bell Boeing facility in Amarillo, Texas.

The Osprey has three flight control computers, which back each other up in case one malfunctions. The chip in question is responsible for switching over to a back-up computer. Testing found that the chip fails in extremely cold temperatures.

Not all of the Ospreys have computers with this particular chip, which was introduced to the aircraft in 2003. Nineteen sets of flight control computers are unaffected, said James Darcy, spokesman for the V-22 Joint Program Office.

Those sets have been divided between four Marine Corps Air Station New River, N.C.-based squadrons, and four sets have been sent to the Air Force, Darcy said.

Of the 15 sets of flight control computers at New River, four are at Marine Medium Tiltrotor Training Squadron 204, four are with Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 263, three are with VMM-162 and four are with Marine Tiltrotor Operational Test and Evaluation Squadron 22.

VMM-263 flew one of its Ospreys Tuesday morning, an air station spokesman said.

The Corps’ remaining 31 Ospreys, a majority of which are based at New River, must wait for modifications to be made to the computers' circuit boards, Darcy said.