The Marine Corps has relieved the command team of an MV-22 Osprey squadron in Kaneohe.
Maj. Gen. Marcus B. Annibale, commanding general of the Okinawa-based 1st Marine Aircraft Wing, relieved Lt. Col. Shaina M. Hennessey of her duties as commanding officer of Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 268, along with its senior enlisted leader Sgt. Maj. Jamie Lampley and the squadron’s unnamed executive officer.
Maj. Joseph Butterfield, a spokesperson for the 1st MAW, told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser in a statement that Hennessey was relieved due to a “loss of trust and confidence in her ability to uphold the safety and readiness standards expected in Marine Corps Aviation.” He did not state why Lampley and the other unnamed Marine officer were also relieved.
“We hold ourselves to the highest standards of performance, addressing challenges head-on to uphold operational excellence,” said Butterfield. “We are committed to implementing best practices and policies that ensure a strong coupling of well-prepared pilots and crews with safe, mission-ready aircraft.
The 268th is one of two Osprey squadrons at Kaneohe Bay under Marine Aircraft Group 24, which answers to the 1st MAW. Annibale’s order, first reported by Stars &Stripes, was effective Oct. 28.
Hennessey, who has experience piloting both Ospreys and CH-46E Sea Knights, took command of the squadron in December and previously served as an operational planner for the I Marine Expeditionary Force at Camp Pendleton, Calif., from July 2021 to June 2024, according to her LinkedIn profile.
Lampley had served as the command’s senior enlisted leader since February 2024, according to an archived official biography and enlisted in the Marine Corps in 2000. The 1st MAW would not identify the executive officer who had been relieved, but said that they had most recently served as the squadron’s aviation maintenance officer.
Butterfield said that Lt. Col. John J. Campbell has taken command of the squadron and that Sgt. Maj. Joshua J. Henderson took over from Lampley. Campbell most recently led the personnel support detachment for MAG 24, according to his service biography. Henderson previously served as the senior enlisted man for Marine Aviation Logistics Squadron 24, also based at Kaneohe.
The Osprey is a “tilt-rotor” aircraft that is able to take off and land like a helicopter, but fly like an airplane. That allows it to simultaneously travel faster and farther than a helicopter and land in remote locations without a runway or flight deck that a plane would need. In 2022, an Osprey that deployed with Squadron 268 to Australia as part of Marine Rotational Force Darwin made a 6,100-mile, island-hopping return flight back to Kaneohe that made stops in Fiji, American Samoa and Kiribati along the way.
Since 2020, the Marine Corps has rid its Kaneohe air station of its traditional helicopters in Hawaii to go all-in on Ospreys, along with refueling tankers and drones, as part of a massive restructuring.
But the Osprey has long been a controversial aircraft, dogged by questions about its safety record dating back to when it was being developed. The program began in the 1980s and was plagued with cost overruns, delays and deadly accidents during testing. As of this year, 65 people have died in Osprey crashes — including 35 since the aircraft entered service in 2007.
Two of those deaths were in Hawaii in a highly public crash witnessed by beachgoers and caught on camera by multiple people. In May 2015 an MV-22 Osprey from a California-based unit training in the islands crashed near Bellows Beach after sand pebbles in a large dust cloud — called a “brownout” — entered its engine and were turned into glass by the heat, causing a malfunction and sending it plummeting to the ground.
The crash killed two Marines and injured 20 other service members. At the time, official guidance was that an Osprey could safely fly in brownout conditions for up to a minute — but the engine of the V-22 at Bellows failed after 45 seconds in the dust cloud. In July 2015, the the military amended its flight rules, advising that Osprey pilots should evacuate dust clouds after just 35 seconds instead of the full minute.
But still, in November of that year, the Corps officially blamed and reprimanded the pilots, saying in a public statement that “a proper risk assessment should have prompted the pilots to choose an alternate flight profile, path or landing site that would have minimized or avoided the severe brownout conditions.”
A report by the U.S. Congressional Research Service released in September outlined ongoing concerns about the safety of the Osprey. The report was prompted by renewed scrutiny from lawmakers — four fatal crashes since 2022 have killed 20 service members and injured 20 others.
But there have been no reported or acknowledged Osprey incidents over the past two years related to Squadron 268 or any other Hawaii units.
In September, the squadron took part in a joint exercise with Army Chinook and Apache squadrons from the 25th Combat Aviation Brigade at Wheeler Army Airfield that involved more than 200 deck landings on the Navy’s amphibious assault ship USS America in Hawaii waters, according to a news release by the Navy’s Pacific Fleet.
When asked what specifically was of serious concern in Hawaii to relieve an entire squadron command team, Butterfield told the Star-Advertiser “we have no additional information to release at this time aside from our statement.”
Both the U.S. and Japanese militaries grounded their Osprey fleets for nearly three months after an Air Force CV-22B crashed off Yakushima Island in November 2023, killing eight service members. Investigators attributed that crash to a catastrophic mechanical failure, as well as what they described as a “lack of urgency” by the crew in responding to an engine problem.
The Pentagon has since limited all Osprey models to only missions within 30 minutes of a safe landing zone, a restriction that is expected to remain in place until at least 2026.
In November 2024 a near crash by another Osprey in New Mexico led to the Pentagon again briefly grounding all the aircraft, and in October of this year a U.S. military Osprey made what Japanese officials called an emergency landing at Hanamaki Airport in northeastern Japan, about 300 miles north of Tokyo.
Congress has authorized an additional $60 million for safety enhancements to the Osprey in its fiscal year 2025 defense bill and asked for briefings on upgrades. For the 2026 fiscal year, lawmakers are considering reviews of fleet size, modernization plans, and whether lessons from the Osprey are being applied to the Army’s Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft program, which seeks to replace the most of the Army’s iconic Black Hawk helicopters with new tilt-rotor aircraft.
Source: The Garden Island
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