V-22 Osprey prototype Ship 2 crash

Boeing Vertol Philadelphia. Ship 2 was hovering 10–12 feet up; oscillated and flipped on its back because two control wires had been miswired (right and left reversed). Test pilot walked away. "Sort of an embarrassment."

Ship one was a prototype mock-up — never flew, wasn't designed to fly, I'm not sure it ever had engines in it. Just to see if things would fit together. Ship two was at the Philadelphia Boeing Vertol plant, and they'd taken it up about ten or twelve feet off the ground. They have this on video — sort of an interesting video, you can probably find it on YouTube now. It's hovering there in helicopter mode, and then all of a sudden you see it start to oscillate, and then it flips on its back and destroyed itself. They had a test pilot, and they all walked away. Someone had miswired the controls, two wires, so that if the pilot put in the input to go right or left — when they flipped the wires it would go left when you said right. So he was trying to stabilize the thing, and he just made the oscillations bigger until he flipped it over like a turtle. That was sort of an embarrassment.