The Dream Machine

by Richard Whittle

  Dubberly also nixed a Boeing Vertol plan to use the famous composite Kevlar, the stuff used in bulletproof vests, in the underflooring of the fuselage. The Kevlar was supposed to help protect the occupants of the aircraft in a crash. Boeing Vertol engineer Derek Hart had been working on that when he heard some bad news from Boeing Seattle. Big Boeing had used Kevlar skins with honeycomb inside the flaps and ailerons of its Boeing 757 commercial airliners, which went into service in 1983. On flights from Los Angeles to Mexico City, the 757s often flew through extremes of hot and cold air, causing moisture to condense on the Kevlar skins. As it turned out, the skins weren’t impermeable. Moisture was getting into the honeycomb, freezing, and popping the Kevlar skins. Hart was still pondering the problem when his phone rang one day. It was Dubberly.

  “Get your ass down here, I want to talk to you about Kevlar,” Dubberly ordered. Hart drove down to Navair’s offices in Crystal City the next day. When he got to Dubberly’s office, he got explicit instructions from The Customer. “I know you’ve got designs going on right now which have got Kevlar under the floor,” Dubberly told Hart. “Get that shit out of my airplane.”

  * * *

  The one simple problem they never could solve was weight. As preliminary design neared its end, the JVX was still going to be several thousand pounds over Navair’s initial requirement of 31,886 pounds empty. It was even going to be over a 2,500-pound “weight contingency”—an overweight allowance—Navair had granted. That was going to make the aircraft pricier. In those days, the rule of thumb in aircraft design was that structure cost about $1,000 a pound. The blade fold and wing stow mechanisms alone weighed a couple of thousand pounds—in other words, cost a couple of million dollars. Not using honeycomb in the composite fuselage was going to add more. Using more powerful engines would cost weight, too. The list went on and on.

  The engineers had always known weight was going to be a problem in a tiltrotor this big, but no one expected it to be this bad. Composites were supposed to make the JVX about 25 percent lighter than an aluminum aircraft the same size. “Fly-by-wire” flight controls were supposed to reduce weight, too. Instead, both ended up adding it.

  The all-composite fuselage was going to be a lot heavier not only because they couldn’t use honeycomb but also because of a surprise Boeing Vertol got when they did their risk reduction studies. It turned out that composite ribs for the fuselage—called “frames” or “formers,” depending on their size—had to be thicker than expected to turn corners and hold their shape under the loads they would have to bear. There was also another problem with composite frames and formers. As Boeing Vertol workers hand-built samples to test, they found it almost impossible to make any two come out of the autoclave the same thickness and strength. It was a little like trying to make a bracket for a bookshelf by forming layers of electrician’s tape in a right angle and baking them hard. The epoxy that held the fibers together would be a little too thick here, a little too thin there, creating wrinkles and voids, and thus weaknesses when it was baked. Three or four out of every ten frames and formers—items that took a laborious and expensive three to four weeks to make—had to be thrown away.

  Fly-by-wire wasn’t the weight saver Bell-Boeing had expected, either. Logically, electronic flight controls should be far lighter than mechanical ones; wires are lighter than steel rods. But not if you have to install them in triplicate so you can keep flying even if a bullet knocks out one system. These weren’t thin little wires of the sort that run from your computer or TV to the wall, either. They were bulky cables, consisting of thousands of wires encased in rubber insulation and wrapped together into bundles, some as thick as the trunk of a sapling. The weight of the wires in the three fly-by-wire systems turned out to be heavier than a single mechanical control system would have been. But with the JVX’s survivability requirements, a single mechanical system wasn’t an option.

  Weight also drove another decision that ended up causing a lot of headaches and heartaches once the JVX started flying. Rather than the typical hydraulic system used in helicopters and most airplanes in those days, the companies decided to use a special, lighter one. Hydraulics move heavy objects by forcing a liquid, usually oil, through tubes to a cylinder with a piston in the middle. When the trapped fluid is pumped through the cylinder, or “actuator,” it pushes the piston, which pushes a metal rod, which moves the heavy object, such as a rotor blade or aileron. Helicopters and most airplanes in those days used hydraulic systems whose internal pressure was 3,000 pounds per square inch (psi). Fighter plane makers had begun using 5,000-psi hydraulic systems, which pushed far smaller amounts of fluid through far smaller tubes to move far smaller actuators, making the system much lighter. To save weight, Bell and Boeing Vertol decided to go with a 5,000-psi system and make the tubes of titanium rather than the usual stainless steel. Titanium was just as strong and about half as heavy as stainless steel, but it was also more brittle, which meant it could spring leaks more easily. Some JVX engineers figured the 5,000-psi system could end up being a maintenance problem, because its hydraulic tubes would have to turn corners and bend as the nacelles tilted, unlike the tubes in a fighter jet. They also figured they had no choice. It appeared there was no way to build a tiltrotor this size using a standard 3,000-psi hydraulic system, partly because of the size and weight of the actuators required, so the hydraulics were going to be 5,000-psi.

  Even with weight-saving measures like that, the estimates kept showing that the JVX was going to tip the scales empty at maybe 34,000 or 35,000 pounds, well above Navair’s required weight of 31,886 pounds. If the engines were powerful enough and the proprotors were aerodynamically adequate, they might still meet the payload requirements, but not by much.

  By 1985, the preliminary design was finished and the companies began doing the thousands of detailed drawings needed to fabricate components to build prototype aircraft. Wernicke was still distressed by how this first real-world tiltrotor was likely to turn out. He kept telling his boss, Stan Martin, that Bell-Boeing just had to persuade Navair to cut some requirements. There was no other way to get the weight down to a reasonable level. “We should take the position of, ‘Screw those guys, we’re either going to build them a good airplane or not build it at all,’ ” Wernicke told Martin. “Well,” Wernicke told me, “that’s not how it works. We either take their money and build it or we don’t have a program.”

  Wernicke had expressed his views on the requirements to The Customer as well, which got back to his bosses. Wernicke only went to Navair once or twice, though. He quickly decided it was a waste of his time. Eventually, he took things a step further and stopped going to management meetings at Bell, too. As the companies began building their prototypes, Bell moved Wernicke aside and gave his chief tiltrotor designer job to someone else. Wernicke got a new assignment. From now on, he would no longer supervise a large team of engineers. Instead he would spend all day every day trying to find ways to get the aircraft’s weight down.

  “He didn’t want to continue on the [project] because he didn’t believe in it and we were agreeable to that, because we didn’t want anybody on it that couldn’t embrace it with one hundred and ten percent of their enthusiasm,” Wernicke’s boss at the time, Stan Martin, told me.

  The first prototype wouldn’t fly for several years yet, but now they knew how it would look. Wernicke had made a lot of the decisions that helped dictate the aircraft’s appearance, and he was sick at heart about it.

  Over the two decades since Robert Lichten had taken him under his wing, Wernicke had become a true believer in the tiltrotor. He never forgot Lichten’s admonition against letting the tiltrotor take over his life, but over time, it had captured his imagination. Wernicke had begun his career in the 1950s as one of those who genuinely expected to see a helicopter in every garage some day and hoped to help make it happen. By 1965, he knew it never would, and that frustrated him. Lichten and the tiltrotor had given him new inspiration—saved his career, he thought, by gi
ving him something to work on that was really going to matter. Other engineers and inventors had been trying for a good thirty years before Wernicke came along to make an aircraft with commercial potential that could take off and land vertically yet fly as well as an airplane—a machine that could conquer the air. Wernicke was proud that he and Bob Lichten were two of the first to see that the tiltrotor was the only true way to make such a dream machine. Lichten had seen it first, of course, but as Wernicke led Bell’s engineers in designing and building the XV-15, he became utterly convinced the tiltrotor was going to change the world. It just had to be, Wernicke thought. He was so sure of it, sometimes he’d look around and think, “Why build helicopters anymore? Why aren’t they all building tiltrotors?” When the XV-15 stole the Paris Air Show in 1981—on the very airfield where Charles Lindbergh had changed aviation history, and the world, by completing the first nonstop transatlantic flight in 1927—Wernicke thought that was the turning point. Now, he was sure, Bell would get a chance to build a real production tiltrotor, a chance to prove to the world that the tiltrotor really was the dream machine. Then the military had come up with the JVX and its ridiculous requirements, a straitjacket of constraints that had forced him to design an aircraft that just might make people think the tiltrotor was an idea whose time hadn’t come after all, and never would.

  Wernicke had done the best he could supervising the JVX’s design, but he was chagrined with the result. The XV-15, now that was a beauty. She had clean lines, a pretty face, a cute little tail, and nacelles just the right size. The JVX was going to be a beast by comparison. Bell-Boeing’s conceptual drawings had shown an aerodynamically refined aircraft. The JVX had turned out differently. It had a nose like a porpoise and a body as chunky as a whale’s. Bulging out to the sides from the fuselage’s bottom were big protuberances called “sponsons,” large compartments to house the rear landing gear and some of the avionics. The engineers had been forced to replace the sleek sponsons in the original Bell-Boeing concept with these blubbery-looking things because they needed a place to carry enough fuel to meet the JVX’s range requirement. They resembled a failed dieter’s spare tire, and at that point, the JVX was indeed a failed dieter. The only grace in its lines was the way its rear end tapered up to the H-shaped tail, but the tail itself was oversized. The afterbody was also swaybacked to allow room for a nacelle to swing over it when the wing was stowed. The wing, which hung over the new tiltrotor’s back like a yoke over an ox’s neck, was thick and stubby, and its tips swept slightly forward. On the wingtips hung the Osprey’s most striking feature: two jarringly big nacelles that ballooned out like Popeye the Sailor’s bulging forearms. Each nacelle was to hold a beefy turbine engine—the engines would have to be big to lift such a machine—and attached to each engine would be those undersized, yet immense-looking, three-bladed proprotors.

  “It’s a very chubby airplane,” Wernicke told me. “I’ve always thought it was ugly.” When he said it, he sounded sad.

  CHAPTER SIX

  YOUNG WINSTON’S OSPREY

  On the evening of Friday, November 9, 1984, Boeing Vertol president Joe Mallen was at the glitzy Washington Hilton Hotel, shuffling through the reception line at the annual Marine Corps Birthday Ball, when he came to John Lehman. The young, tuxedo-clad Navy secretary flashed a Cheshire cat grin, grabbed Mallen’s hand, and pulled him aside.

  “We’re going to call it the ‘Osprey,’ ” Lehman confided. “Have your people put together a couple of logos.”

  Like the proud parent he was, Lehman had picked the name for the JVX himself. Earlier that year, Lehman had told Bell Helicopter, Boeing Vertol, and the Naval Air Systems Command to hold internal contests to come up with suggestions. Some evoked the way the tiltrotor would fly; most were drawn from history, legend and mythology. Bell’s suggestions were Centaur, Condor, Excalibur, Griffin, and Pegasus. Navair offered Bandit, Centurion, Comanche, Dragonfly, Javelin, or Stalker. Boeing Vertol came up with Hummingbird, Lancer, Olympian, Panther, and Osprey. “Osprey” suited Lehman’s temperament. The osprey, Pandion haliaetus, is an aquatic bird of prey, a medium-sized, brown and white raptor found all over the world. Nature’s osprey feeds almost exclusively on fish, which it hovers over before diving to snare them with its powerful talons. The bird then takes off vertically to haul its catch to shore and eat it. The JVX wasn’t going to devour America’s enemies itself, but it was being built to carry Marines who would pounce on them. Lehman liked the analogy. A Department of Defense directive determined the new tiltrotor’s “Mission Design Series” letter and number: “V” for Vertical Take Off and Landing, “22” because that was its place on the historical list of “V” aircraft. In January 1985, the JVX officially became the V-22 Osprey.

  Naming the Osprey himself was just one sign of Lehman’s paternalistic attitude toward the project he sired when he told the Marines to buy a tiltrotor. Lehman also had steered Bell Helicopter and Boeing Vertol together to bid on the program by telling each of their presidents to find a partner. He had helped the Marines and the companies kindle support in Congress to get the program started. He had forced the Navy to take charge when the Army balked at running the program in December 1982. Until he left office in 1987, Lehman used his cunning and clout to ward off attacks on the Osprey, or at least blunt them.

  Bell and Boeing were grateful for such a patron at first, for the Osprey was an endangered species from the day Lehman hatched it. Competing interests in the defense industry, within the armed services, and on Capitol Hill were jealously circling the fledgling from the start, hungrily eyeing the estimated billions of dollars the Pentagon was expected to spend on the new tiltrotor over the next couple of decades. If Lehman hadn’t kept it under his wing, the Osprey’s natural enemies likely would have swooped down and plucked it clean before the preliminary design was done. Dick Spivey and others at Bell and Boeing were happy to have Lehman act as if he owned the Osprey at first. By the time he left office, though, they were glad to see him go.

  * * *

  The Osprey’s political troubles began when it was still just called the JVX. The troublemaker was the Army’s second-ranking civilian, Under-secretary James R. Ambrose, a gray, thin-lipped workaholic who had joined the Reagan administration after thirty-six years as a defense industry executive. When he got to the Pentagon, Ambrose quickly became known for driving subordinates and others to distraction with insatiable demands for information. If he was dying to know the answer to a question, he didn’t hesitate to call Army program managers at 2 or 3 a.m. Ambrose called his style “Management By Asking Questions,” and after he had asked enough questions about the tiltrotor, he decided the Army had higher priorities.

  First, in December 1982, Ambrose handed over management of the JVX to the Navy Department. Then, on May 13, 1983, barely two weeks after Navair gave Bell-Boeing their contract for the new tiltrotor, Ambrose announced he was pulling the Army out of the program altogether. “Request you advise all appropriate offices and agencies that we are no longer participants,” he said in a memo to the Army staff.

  Ambrose’s decision hit the Marines and Lehman like a sucker punch. They hadn’t seen it coming, and without the Army, the whole JVX program might implode. The Army dropping out would undermine support in the Pentagon and Congress in several ways. For starters, the Army wouldn’t be taking the 288 Ospreys it had planned to buy for electronic spying missions. That would make those bought by the Marines, the Navy, and the Air Force more expensive, for like most manufacturers, aircraft makers can offer cheaper prices when they sell in greater volume. The Air Force already had cut the number of Ospreys it planned to buy from 200 to 80. If the tiltrotor got more expensive, the Air Force might follow the Army’s lead and quit the program entirely, too. Even if the Air Force stayed in, the Marines might have a harder time getting money for the JVX. Not only would the Army no longer be arguing for the tiltrotor, it would be trying to get money for other projects instead. Worst of all, without the Army, the JVX would no lo
nger be a true “joint program,” one of its chief selling points. People in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and Congress would have to wonder if the Marines, with the smallest of service budgets, could really afford this expensive new machine. Each Osprey already was expected to cost about $15 million, without even counting future inflation or the cost of developing the new tiltrotor.

  The Marines decided to fight—to try to get Ambrose’s decision reversed, or at least amended. The Navy Department quickly got the issue put on the fall agenda of the Defense Resources Board, a committee of top officials who divvied up the Pentagon budget in those days. When the DRB took up the issue, General P. X. Kelley, who became commandant of the Marine Corps that July, would “brief off ” against General John Wickham, the chief of staff of the Army. Headquarters Marine Corps assigned Major Bob Magnus to prepare Kelley. Magnus canceled his summer leave and started working up a briefing.

  On Capitol Hill, meanwhile, the Marines started trying to defuse the “too-costly” argument. Lieutenant General William Fitch, the deputy chief of staff for aviation, was at the Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee on July 28, 1983, to testify on the Marine Corps aviation budget. The chairman, Republican senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, had been an Army Air Corps transport pilot in World War II and was a friend of the military. When lobbyist George Troutman started working the Hill for Bell Helicopter two years earlier, Stevens was a prime target for his argument that the tiltrotor would be ideal not only for military but civilian aviation. Stevens agreed.

  The July hearing was held in the neo-Roman pomp of room SD-192 in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, a high-ceilinged space whose walls were paneled in light teak and green Monte Verde marble wainscoting. Stevens and a couple of other senators sat behind the slightly raised, semi-circular dais. Fitch sat at a long, wooden witness table. Behind him in leather chairs hovered several aides—“horse holders,” in military slang— to back him up. One was Magnus, one of Fitch’s favorites.