“Magnus was the type of guy that just thought, ‘Congressional liaison’s fine but it takes too long to bring them up to speed,’ ” said Bob Balch, Magnus’s onetime superior in the aviation branch. “He was a ‘let’s get it done in the next forty-five seconds’ kind of guy. And of course, in his mind, it was the most important thing on Earth because ‘It’s my program.’ He had his own back channels. He was a genius at that kind of stuff. He loved it, because he understood that was how Washington worked. It was information and who has it. It was understanding where the money was and who controlled it.”
For a fitness report, Balch once had Magnus list what he had done to get the JVX program off the ground. In Magnus’s small, neat hand-writing—part print, part cursive—the list ran five pages and included nearly fifty items.
As word spread that the JVX surely would be a tiltrotor, guest pilots flocked to Texas to fly the XV-15. “People wanted to fly in that thing just as if you had a candy store,” pilot Dorman Cannon chuckled. More generals flew, as did one of Senator Tower’s top aides. To promote the tiltrotor’s civil aviation potential, Spivey brought in two pilots from the Federal Aviation Administration to fly it as well. Then Lehman finally got his turn.
Lehman had been practicing his helicopter piloting skills at the Marine Corps Base in Quantico, Virginia, a forty-five-minute drive south of Washington, with HMX-1, the squadron that flies the president in “Marine One,” as the big green and white choppers are known when the chief executive is inside. In late March, a team of Bell officials including test pilot Cannon and Spivey took the XV-15 there. They were met by Lehman—and by Magnus, who gave the secretary an update on where the JVX program stood. Spivey briefed Lehman on the XV-15’s technology, showed him data, and talked about how tiltrotors could have avoided the humiliation of Desert One. Lehman didn’t give either much time. He was there to fly. As Cannon gave him a preflight briefing on how to pilot the XV-15 and eject from it if necessary, Lehman literally kept licking his lips, whether out of nervousness or eagerness, Cannon wasn’t sure. Soon Cannon and Lehman took off on the flight Young Winston had wanted since Paris. Lehman agreed to come back only when the fuel warning light went on.
A photo of him climbing out of the aircraft upon their return tells the rest of the tale. Wearing a flight suit and aviator sunglasses, Lehman has to stoop to exit the XV-15’s narrow hatch, but his head is up, and he beams out at those awaiting him with that smile little kids wear when they get off a roller coaster for the first time, just before they beg, “Can I go again? Puh-leeze?”
Two days later, Lehman visited House Majority Leader Wright in his Capitol office. They talked about Lehman’s XV-15 flight and about how to ensure the JVX program got funded in that year’s defense bills. “I didn’t take too much encouraging,” Wright told me. If Bell could sell tiltrotors to the military, that would create jobs in Wright’s Fort Worth district. If the military building it enabled the tiltrotor to succeed as a civilian aircraft, that would guarantee those jobs even if military spending declined. “It struck me as a win-win situation,” Wright said. Democrat Wright and Republican Senator Tower, a fellow Texan and one of Lehman’s mentors, often worked together to promote military projects in Texas. Soon they were coordinating their efforts to win allies in Congress for the JVX, too.
* * *
After the program was announced, Jim Atkins sought Lehman’s advice on what Bell needed to do to win the contract. “I see the program being so large that you need a partner,” Lehman told him. “That is up to you, it’s your choice. Do what you want.”
At that point, what Atkins wanted was whatever Lehman wanted. Atkins pondered the possibilities and approached Joseph P. Mallen, the president of Boeing Vertol, which had designed a tiltrotor once upon a time and built a tilt-wing. Boeing Vertol was experienced in building big helicopters with cabins large enough to hold twenty-four troops, which Atkins knew would be one of the JVX requirements, and Mallen and Lehman had a personal relationship. Lehman had been a consultant to Boeing Vertol before he became Navy secretary. For a lot of reasons, teaming with Boeing would be a better bet for Bell than competing with them for the JVX deal.
The two executives met poolside during an aviation trade fair in the Southwest that winter and continued their conversation in Atkins’s suite. They took to each other immediately, and by the end of their talk, they’d shaken hands on a deal to form a 50–50 partnership to design a big, new military tiltrotor and bid it for the JVX.
The Bell-Boeing partnership was announced in June 1982. A month later, Horner, Troutman, and Spivey went to Philadelphia for a meeting with their Boeing counterparts. Spivey thought it was a natural fit. Boeing Vertol had always built big helicopters and Bell had always built small ones; they weren’t direct competitors, the way Bell and Sikorsky were, so there was no bad blood between them. Boeing was also one of the aviation industry’s best “systems integrators,” a company skilled at incorporating high-tech gear into an aircraft. Bell’s new partner also offered considerable political clout. Boeing Vertol’s helicopter factory was just outside Philadelphia, Lehman’s hometown, and Pennsylvania’s delegation was one of the largest in Congress. Boeing Vertol’s corporate parent, the aerospace giant Boeing Company, could muster political support in a lot of other states as well. Combined with Bell’s backing from the large and powerful Texas delegation, which included the House majority leader, the Senate Armed Services Committee chairman, and other influential members, the Bell-Boeing team looked politically unstoppable.
When the partnership was announced, a lot of people following the JVX figured the competition was over. Spivey wasn’t so sure. In July, he noted in his work diary that Sikorsky had gotten the Army to extend the expected deadline for the JVX competition by three months. “Worried about Syk. killing it,” Spivey wrote, characteristically misspelling his abbreviation for Sikorsky.
A month later, the JVX program office invited representatives from twenty-five companies to a briefing where program officials told them the tiltrotor was the “favored technology,” the only one able to meet the requirements of all four armed services. This ruled out Sikorsky’s Advancing Blade Concept helicopter, but JVX program officials were still hoping to get Sikorsky to bid. If Bell-Boeing had no competition, it might be hard to get a good price out of them. There was also the chance that either Congress or the Reagan administration might cancel the program if there were no competition. On August 26, 1982, Spivey noted in his work diary that Sikorsky had “asked for XV-15 FLT,” and a Sikorsky pilot in fact flew NASA’s XV-15 in October.
By the fall, Spivey wasn’t just worried about competition from Sikorsky, he feared the whole JVX program might implode. It was looking shaky. The three service secretaries had finally signed an agreement in June saying they would go ahead with the JVX, and the top leadership of the Marine Corps was clearly on the same page at last, partly because White had retired in June as well. He was replaced as deputy chief of staff for aviation by Lieutenant General William F. Fitch, a believer in VSTOL aircraft. Six weeks after he replaced White, Fitch went to Fort Worth and flew the XV-15. In the next year’s budget hearings, Fitch would tell a Senate committee that the tiltrotor was “a step comparable to the introduction of the jet engine for fighter aircraft.”
The Army, though, which had started out demanding that it run the JVX program because it was NASA’s partner on the XV-15, soon cooled to the project. During internal budget battles in 1982, pressure from generals more interested in other ways of spending the Army’s money rose. The undersecretary of the Army, James Ambrose, started arguing internally that a tiltrotor was going to be too expensive and too visible to enemy radar for the Army’s electronic warfare mission. In October, Lehman met with him and Army Secretary John Marsh, and while Ambrose didn’t say the Army wanted to pull out altogether, he and Marsh wanted to hand off the Army’s role as executive agency. Under the joint services agreement, the Navy was supposed to provide 50 percent of the money and buy most of t
he aircraft anyway. Lehman said the Navy would be happy to take over, and Navair started running the JVX program in December.
That same month, Navair solicited bids. The program office had sent draft copies to about a hundred defense companies for comment during the summer. Boeing Vertol had sent about fifty engineers to Bell in Fort Worth, and the companies were nearly done putting their bid together. Personal computers and compact disks were still mere visions in those days, so the Bell-Boeing proposal was on about a thousand pounds of paper. Spivey helped put it together, wondering all the while if Sikorsky was going to snatch away the deal he’d been working toward all these years. The latest rumor was that Sikorsky wasn’t going to bid after all, but you could never be sure. He decided to take the bid to Washington himself.
By now, Dick Spivey was forty-two years old and a salesman with a dream he’d been selling more than half his career. He’d lost his hair and his first wife since he’d embarked on his quest. He’d traveled thousands of miles and spent countless lonely nights in hotel rooms. He’d recently remarried, but at the moment, he was captivated by the JVX bid. He and his new bride, a nurse anesthetist named Terry, had wed in November but delayed a honeymoon until June. Spivey thought his future might be decided by whether Bell-Boeing won this contract. After a plunge in civilian helicopter sales that year, Bell had just laid off more than 1,500 of 8,000 employees.
On February 22, 1983, Spivey took an American Airlines flight to Washington National Airport. He was met in a rented van by a colleague from Bell’s Washington office, Gerald Gard. They stopped by the cargo terminal to pick up the thirty or so cardboard boxes containing Bell-Boeing’s bid, then drove two and a half miles to an outcropping of speckled-granite high-rises known as Crystal City. They parked underneath the Holiday Inn Crystal City, whose basement garage was connected to an adjacent high-rise called Jefferson Plaza One, where Navair’s offices were. Spivey spent the night in the Holiday Inn. The next morning, he and Gard borrowed a hand truck, loaded the cardboard boxes on it, and wheeled them over to Navair. A guard directed them to an empty room, where they stacked the boxes on the carpeted floor and got a receipt from a bureaucrat.
“Do you have room for everybody’s proposals?” Gard asked a receptionist, fishing to find out if Sikorsky was going to bid.
“You’re the only ones who’re going to be bringing in a proposal,” she replied. So Sikorsky wasn’t going to bid after all, Gard concluded. He gave Spivey the news and headed back to his office. Spivey, though, wasn’t sure the receptionist knew what she was talking about, and he couldn’t bring himself to leave. He just had to see for himself.
He found a chair somewhere and sat down outside the room where he and Gard had put the Bell-Boeing proposal. The receptionist wasn’t very chatty, so Spivey just sat there all day, reading newspapers and getting up now and then to pace the hall or get a drink of water. At times, he found himself hoping the receptionist was right and no one else was bidding, but then he feared what might happen if that were so. He could imagine the Pentagon throwing out Bell-Boeing’s proposal for lack of competition and starting over. The virtue of free market competition was a constant Reagan refrain. On the other hand, it wouldn’t be Bell-Boeing’s fault if no one else chose to compete.
By the 4:30 P.M. bid deadline, no one else had shown up. Two months later, on April 25, Navair announced it was giving Bell-Boeing a $68.7 million contract to design a tiltrotor for the JVX, build a prototype rotor and other parts, and conduct wind tunnel tests. If all went well, this first contract would lead later to multibillion-dollar deals to build prototype aircraft, test them, and produce the new tiltrotor by the hundreds. Spivey braced himself for a protest by Sikorsky. When none came, he was ecstatic.
Spivey felt proud. He hadn’t sold the tiltrotor by himself, but he’d been selling it longer than just about anyone else, and with as much or more enthusiasm. The contacts he’d cultivated among mid-level officers in the Marine Corps had been vital to the sale, and so had Bell’s use of the XV-15 as a marketing tool. Spivey’s guest pilot program had been a major part of that. Everyone agreed the XV-15 had been the key. Horner teased Spivey about that. “We didn’t need you,” he’d say. “The airplane sold itself.” Spivey didn’t mind when Horner said that; he knew the boss was just ribbing him. Horner also liked to tell Spivey his business card really ought to say “tiltrotor pedlar,” and one day Spivey called his bluff. He got some cards made up that said just that, and when he gave one to Horner, they had a good laugh. It rankled Spivey, though, when others at Bell started saying the tiltrotor had sold itself. He knew some engineers and others looked down on marketers. “We were supposed to be ‘hucksters,’” Spivey said. “We were ‘selling snake oil.’ ”
The XV-15 was far from snake oil, but what it represented—and what it had sold—was the dream, not a useful machine. The little tiltrotor stoked the imaginations of a widening circle of believers much as model planes fuel the fantasies of children. The XV-15 met the ultimate aviation challenge much the way venerated aeronautics professor Alexander Klemin had stated it in 1938. It could do “substantially everything that a bird can do in the air.” But the XV-15 and the big, beefy tiltrotor that Bell-Boeing had just contracted to design—and promised to have ready for the battlefield in a mere eight years—were only superficially alike. They were the same genus but different species.
The XV-15 weighed about 10,000 pounds. It could carry two pilots, roughly 1,500 pounds of fuel, and a thousand pounds or so of test instruments. It was never flown in the rain or other bad weather because nearly every inch of its fuselage, wing, and rotors was covered with data-gathering gauges that could be damaged by precipitation.
The tiltrotor the services wanted—and that Bell-Boeing had promised—was to carry an aircrew of three and twenty-four Marines with packs and weapons from the deck of a ship to a shore a couple of hundred miles away, turn back to the ship, and do the same thing over again. It was to cruise at 250 knots, “dash” at up to 300, and fly nearly 2,400 miles without refueling. It was to use the latest computerized “flyby-wire” flight controls instead of the XV-15’s bell cranks and push-pull rods. It was to incorporate electronic gear allowing it to fly in any weather, day or night, in any climate. It was to be used for ten different missions by four armed services. It was going to be the superplane of military transports—a real dream machine.
Nearly a quarter century later, Bob Magnus, by then a white-haired four-star general and assistant commandant of the Marine Corps, told me that, compared with what he and the others who set the requirements for the JVX envisioned, “The XV-15 was a Tinker Toy.”
“The XV-15 proved that there was nothing magic or fatal about tilt-rotor technology,” Magnus said. Then he added, “Now of course, you could always screw it up when you built one.”
CHAPTER FIVE
THE MACHINE
When convertiplane visionary Gerard Herrick took the stage at the 1938 Rotating Wing Aircraft Meeting in Philadelphia, he quickly lived up to his introduction as “a man who is captain of his own soul.” Herrick softened up his audience of engineers, inventors, and aviation executives with a poem whose author he identified only as Al F. Davis. It was called “One of Our Simple Problems.”
“Design a plane” the head men say,
It must be built in such a way,
That the dumbest mug can fly hands off,
Make the hardest landing still feel soft,
Make up for brains that the pilot lacks,
Make the seats lean forward and still lean back,
Supply and demand will be the thing,
Forget the span and chord of wing.
The spar must be just six feet long,
For scraps of spruce cost but a song.
The fuselage can be tied with a string,
Or by similar method hung to the wing,
It must be safe and in the main,
Be able to stand a hurricane,
It must be fast and not land hot
(What a helluva job the designer’s got!)
Fast and light and comfortable too,
With a cruising range to Timbuctoo.
Of course this is no common hack,
For it must carry the load of a ten-ton Mack.
It must climb straight up and land straight down,
But the pilot must scarcely feel the ground.
Yes, flaps and brakes and retractable gear,
Hell’s bells! They must think the millennium’s here.
And one last word the head men say,
“It’s gotta be finished by yesterday.”
On second thought there’s one thing more,
They’ll have to sell at the ten-cent store!
Kenneth G. Wernicke was only six years old, a kid in Kansas City, when Gerard Herrick entertained the rotary wing pioneers with that aircraft designer’s satirical lament. Forty-four years later, Wernicke was an aircraft designer himself, Bell’s chief tiltrotor engineer. When the Bell-Boeing team got the specifications for the JVX and Wernicke saw what the military was demanding, he might have penned a sardonic rhyme himself—if he hadn’t been so appalled.
Wernicke had no problem with the basic requirements: high speed, long range, a fuselage big enough for two squads of Marines or an F-18 fighter jet engine. That was all expected. But that was just the beginning. They also wanted the JVX to be tougher than any helicopter ever built, able to shrug off gunfire and keep flying, dodge or fool enemy missiles, carry its own guns to fire back. That was going to make it heavy. They wanted the latest and greatest electronic gear installed so it could fly anytime, anywhere, in any weather. That was going to make it heavier. Worst of all, they wanted it to operate from an amphibious assault ship. That meant it would need intricate mechanisms to fold its rotors and rotate its wing so it would fit on a ship’s elevator and underneath the deck to be stowed or worked on. That was going to make it heavier still. But the kicker was this: operating from the ship also meant the rotors would have to be undersized, which would make it even harder for the aircraft to carry its required payload.
The Dream Machine Page 14