I’m quite fond of rotorcraft, and rarely get to indulge this in any way, though the local airport being used for refueling the regional medevacs helps to some degree, and occasionally we get buzzed. But as we found long before moving here when only visiting the town, said airport also gets used for practice by Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey tiltrotors, military aircraft likely based out of Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station. To date, the only time I caught this since moving here was at night, and while I cruised over to the airport to see what I could, what I could wasn’t much – mostly, just navigation lights passing with a moderate amount of noise, though at one point I did realize that Osprey have tip-lights on their rotor blades, and faint green circles could be seen escorting the navigation lights through the darkness. These did not unfortunately show up on the videos that I took.
In the past few days, however, the Osprey have returned during the day. Their combination of turboprop engines and heavy rotors lends them a distinctive sound, but we’re semi-shrouded by trees here and I’ve missed a few closer passes because of this. And then the other day, I heard one approaching as I had the camera and long lens handy, and barely caught it as it passed almost directly over the property.
Aside from the fact that I had maybe just under two seconds to focus and frame as it zoomed overhead, this also told me that 600mm was too much magnification if they were going to be this low, though it shows the half-open cargo hatch clearly. And you have to admit, that’s some excellent detail on what is probably the fuel-dump pipe on the tail…
I figured they were probably doing the usual, which was approach and departure practice on our little not-busy airport, so I headed over there to see if I could snag some better views. And I did, to a degree anyway.
This is banking around for approach, catching the later afternoon sun at a decent angle. You can see that the engine nacelles are already rolled back though the landing gear hasn’t been deployed yet; this is roughly 60° off of the approach corridor, but likely less than half a kilometer from the runway threshold. Tiltrotors cruise with the rotors rolled all the way forward just like any standard propeller aircraft, but obviously the rotor disk is too big for them to be on the ground this way, so they’re always rolled back towards vertical for takeoff and landing, though not always all the way.
After sitting down out of my sight on the taxiway or end of the runway for some time (there are too many hangars blocking that view,) this is the aircraft now climbing out, mostly in hover mode but you can see the nacelles are forward slightly to give more efficient forward thrust. Osprey can maneuver in all directions with the nacelles fully vertical, like any helicopter, but not particularly quickly, and so when climbing out and accelerating, the nacelles roll forward a bit, trading a little lift for speed. Curiously, the flaps, the hinged portions of the trailing edge of the wings, are still deployed – these provide extra lift but also extra drag, and will be used for both landing (slowing the approach speed while still giving extra lift) and takeoff, but generally this is under full thrust; I would have thought that the extra drag at this low of a forward speed would be more of a hindrance, but I don’t fully understand the aerodynamics of a tiltrotor. You’ll also notice that the chain link fence around the active aircraft area also blocks the view, far too much.
A day later they were back at it, and I had enough forewarning to be ready with the long lens as they approached. I have a flight tracker app on my smutphone, but it only tracks military flights about half of the time; we see flights of F-15s cruise over routinely, at 5,000-10,000 feet, and those never appear on the tracker, though the Osprey do sometimes. Still, I caught it as it appeared over the trees.
The nacelles are now fully forward in cruise mode and the angle isn’t right to be approaching for the runway facing more-or-less towards the house, even though they were only a little over two kilometers from that threshold, so I’m guessing they were doing approaches on another runway. They’d have to be a lot further away for a decent head-on shot, but I’ll take this.
I waited them out, and sure enough, they did another pass about twelve minutes later.
The noise isn’t as great as you might think – it’s much worse in full hover. Here you can see the faint forward-sweep of the wings (and the flaps fully retracted in both passes) while the cargo hatch is open again; I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an Osprey in flight with the hatch closed, to be honest, and I could say the same for the CH-53 heavy lift helicopters (seen below, from North Topsail Beach in 2017.) Don’t ask me the purpose behind this, but it was a nice enough day that I don’t imagine it was chilly inside.
These, by the way, are noisier that the Osprey – and can haul better than half-again the payload, but they’re over 100 knots slower. Like everything, you pick your tradeoffs.
We go back to the previous day at the airport for the closing image, as the departing Osprey passed directly in front of the sun for a bit of a fartsy shot.
Okay, now back to our regular content (notice that I didn’t say, “normal.”)