The parents and widows of four Marines who died when their MV-22 Osprey seized up and crashed on a routine training flight say the companies that built the troubled plane made “intentionally” or “recklessly false statements” about its safety, and put the Marines into an “unsafe and unairworthy aircraft.”

In a federal lawsuit filed Thursday in San Diego, the families of four Marines killed on Swift 11 — an Osprey flight that crashed in 2022 after suffering catastrophic engine failure during routine training in California — say aerospace giants Boening, Bell/Textron and Rolls Royce “supplied false information about the safety of the aircraft” to government and military officials.

Boeing and Bell/Textron are the two contractors who build the Osprey. Rolls Royce builds the Osprey’s engines. 

The Swift 11 crash, according to a statement sent to Task & Purpose by the attorney representing the families, was due to “negligence, negligent misrepresentation, and fraudulent misrepresentation” by the companies “for failing to make truthful statements to the government and to service members about the design, operation, and safety of V-22 Osprey aircraft.”

Officials with Boeing and Rolls Royce did not immediately respond to the emails sent by Task & Purpose seeking comment on the lawsuit. The Marine Corps does not generally comment on ongoing investigations.

The Osprey’s engines and transmission have been found to be the source of a mysterious mechanical failure, known as a hard clutch engagement, or HCE, behind over a dozen Osprey incidents in the last decade, many of them fatal.

The Swift 11 crash was one of the deadliest of those incidents. The San Diego-based Marine MV-22 crashed on June 8, 2022, killing pilots Capt. John J. Sax, 33, and Capt. Nicholas P. Losapio, 31; and three crew members, Cpl. Nathan E. Carlson, 21, Cpl. Seth D. Rasmuson, 21, and Lance Cpl. Evan A. Strickland, 19.

The lawsuit was filed by family members of four of the five Marines — Sax’s widow Amber Sax; Rasmuson’s widow Avery Rasmuson; Carlson’s widow Emily Baxter; and Strickland’s parents, Wayland and Michelle Strickland.

A Marine Corps crash investigation found that the plane fell helplessly from the sky when its transmission system suffered a “hard clutch engagement,” or HCE. The failure, investigators found, was so severe and sudden that the crew had no chance of recovery or survival.

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