“I thought you were instructed not to spend military construction money on this program?” Cheney said sternly. “You’re authorized a test program, that’s it.”
Schaefer assured Cheney the HMX-1 hangar hadn’t been paid for out of the Osprey program’s budget. It had been started “before you and I got here” and it was being built to accommodate helicopters, too, not just the Osprey, Schaefer explained.
Cheney said okay, but as Schaefer made ready to leave, the secretary added: “You understand my instructions?”
“Yes, sir,” Schaefer said.
* * *
Since he was authorized a test program, Schaefer wanted to get as much done as possible to get ready for production, just in case Cheney lost his battle with Congress, as Schaefer hoped he would. Part of the flight test plan was to take the Osprey aboard an amphibious assault ship to prove it could do what it needed to do on such a vessel: land and take off from the deck safely, fold its rotor blades and stow its wing as the vessel sailed, be towed onto an aircraft elevator and put into a hangar deck below without problems, be worked on by mechanics above and below decks. That fall, ships were in short supply. Most were busy taking troops and equipment to Saudi Arabia, where U.S. forces were building up for a campaign to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait, which Iraq had invaded in August. By chance, Schaefer heard that the USS Wasp, the first of a new class of amphibious assault ships called LHDs, was scheduled to start sea trials in late 1990. The Wasp’s skipper was an old acquaintance from a stint Schaefer had done in the Navy Department.
On December 4, a Marine Corps test pilot from Navair and a Boeing pilot flew the fourth Osprey prototype, designated Aircraft 4, from Patuxent River Naval Air Station in coastal Maryland to the Wasp as it sailed fifty miles at sea, and landed on the deck like a helicopter. For the next three days, Aircraft 4 was used to test the blade fold/wing stow mechanisms and let the Wasp’s deck crews move the Osprey around the vessel. On December 7, Aircraft 3, flown by another Marine Corps test pilot and one from Bell, flew out from Patuxent River and did thirteen takeoffs and landings to see how the Osprey would handle in various positions. Bell and Boeing engineers in a 45-foot-long “telemetry van” parked on the deck monitored data transmitted from instruments aboard Aircraft 3 as it flew. The ocean was calm, but it was a cold, wet day. Schaefer watched from the bridge, sipping coffee with his friend the captain.
The tests went well. The deck crews were able to work under the Osprey despite the powerful downwash from its rotors with their high disk loading. Metal deflectors added to the bottoms of the nacelles prevented the red-hot exhaust roaring out of the Osprey’s engines from damaging the ship’s deck. Worries that the wingtip placement of the thirty-eight-foot rotors would cause big problems when one rotor was over the deck and the other was over the water far below proved exaggerated. The pilots had to compensate by banking the wing right a little to keep from rolling left, but they could handle that. The biggest problem, the pilots said in a 288-page report filed later, was holding the Osprey in a steady hover five feet or less over the deck. The aircraft wanted to roll right or left, and it took “excessive pilot compensation” to keep it over one spot without losing control. The electronic flight controls would need to be refined before more sea trials were flown, the pilots said. As it was, the test pilots’ report said, “The excessive pilot compensation required . . . will not allow the combat assault pilot to make consistent, safe shipboard landings and will result in significant damage to aircraft and/or ship equipment and/or injury to flight deck personnel.”
The next month, a series of color photographs of the Osprey operating on and over the Wasp’s deck made the cover of Aviation Week, which published a detailed article on the shipboard tests. “The favorable test results are expected to provide a boost to tiltrotor proponents seeking to save the V-22 production program from cancellation,” the magazine reported.
Schaefer was summoned to Cheney’s office again. As he walked in, Cheney held up the magazine. “What’s this?” he demanded.
Schaefer was ready. Commandant Gray had called him in advance and warned that “Mr. Cheney’s a little upset.”
“It’s a good picture, though, isn’t it?” Schaefer had told Gray.
“Damn right it is,” Gray said.
Schaefer assured Cheney he’d had nothing to do with the photo or the article. He had no control over what Aviation Week published. After he left Cheney’s office, though, Schaefer decided it might be best if the Osprey program avoided publicity for a while.
Five months later, Schaefer was reminded that publicity isn’t something you can always control.
* * *
Five seconds into the flight, by the time they were ten feet in the air, test pilot Grady Wilson knew he had a tiger by the tail. A minute and a half later, he was sure he and his copilot were about to meet their maker.
The maiden flight of the fifth Osprey prototype, Aircraft 5, began just after 6 P.M. on June 11, 1991, at Greater Wilmington Airport in Delaware, where Boeing Helicopter had its flight test center. Wilson, fifty at the time, had gone to work for Boeing just seven months earlier, but test pilots didn’t come with much more experience. A crusty good ole boy from Mississippi, Wilson had learned his trade flying helicopters and airplanes in the Army for twenty-three years, fourteen of them as a test pilot. He spent five of those at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, where he flew the XV-15. Wilson’s copilot in Aircraft 5 that day was Lynn Freisner, the fifty-four-year-old flight test director at Boeing Helicopter. Freisner had hired Wilson. Now it seemed they might die together.
They lifted off after an annoying couple of hours in the cockpit spent sweating up their flight suits as engineers fixed finicky monitoring instruments in the back cabin. The Osprey prototypes had lousy air-conditioning, and though it was only 70 degrees outside, sunshine streaming through the windshield was baking the pilots. The cock-pit’s four computerized Multi-Function Displays—cathode-ray tubes designed to take the place of the dials and gauges on older aircraft— were generating so much heat they were starting to fail. By the time the engineers climbed out, Wilson could think of several reasons he and Freisner should just go back to the hangar. Instead, they taxied out to an asphalt test pad to start flying.
Aircraft 5, painted in Marine Corps camouflage, had never flown before. This was just to be a brief hover, no more than thirty minutes at no more than thirty feet, a shakedown to check out some systems and check off a box so Boeing could get a step closer to turning Aircraft 5 over to the government and getting paid for it. Boeing and Bell had started the fifth prototype in 1988 but stopped for several months in 1989 after Cheney announced he was canceling the Osprey. The companies resumed work on Aircraft 5 later that year, after Congress voted more money, but finishing touches were still being put on the Osprey prototype in a hangar at Wilmington just days before Wilson and Freisner climbed aboard.
Workers at Wilmington showed signs of being rushed. Government inspectors had been complaining for months about sloppiness at the facility. The inspectors kept finding FOD—“foreign object debris”—in and around the Osprey prototypes there. FOD, which rhymes with sod, is anything that might damage an aircraft—a bit of wire, a coin, a mis-laid tool, metal shavings, you name it. FOD sucked into a turbine engine can cause thousands of dollars worth of damage, even a crash. That’s why runways at military bases and flight decks of aircraft carriers are regularly walked by lines of troops or sailors looking for FOD. Over the previous six months, government inspectors had found electric plugs, scissors, rags, a vacuum tool attachment, a six-inch drill bit, a flashlight, nuts, washers, all kinds of FOD in the Osprey prototypes at Wilmington, including Aircraft 5. Seven days before Wilson’s and Freisner’s flight, the government supervisor at Wilmington had suspended flight operations there and stopped payments to Boeing until the company took action to stop the problem. Boeing drew up an anti-FOD plan and the flight suspension was lifted the morning of June 11.
Freisner was copiloting that day only because the engineers had needed so much time to get Aircraft 5 ready. The scheduled copilot had a doctor’s appointment he didn’t want to miss, so Freisner offered to substitute. Like Wilson, Freisner knew something was wrong within seconds after they took off. Aircraft 5 heaved into the air unsteadily, wobbling from side to side like a patient standing up after months of being bedridden. Wilson couldn’t make it do what he wanted. The stick felt sluggish, unresponsive. In nearly three decades of flying, he’d never had an aircraft behave this way. As he struggled with the stick, Freisner said, “Look, let’s get on the ground now.”
“Yeah, we’ve got to get it on the ground,” Wilson muttered, clearly too busy to talk.
Jim Schaefer was in the flight test center tower, watching on closed-circuit video with some flight test engineers. “Aren’t we paying our pilots enough, or are we not training them enough?” Schaefer cracked as they watched the Osprey weave.
Almost as soon as Schaefer spoke, he could see that Wilson had decided to land. Still teetering, the aircraft eased down gradually to about six feet, but then rose back up to about fifteen. It eased down again, this time getting to two or three feet off the ground, but then rose back up to ten feet or so. It started settling again, then went back up, then down, this time more slowly. Finally the wheels touched the ground. As they did, the Osprey started acting like a rodeo bull in the starting gate. First it shrugged left, then hard to the right. As it did, it bounced off its right tire and rolled left so violently the bottom of the nacelle on that side bashed into the asphalt, crushing its base like a beer can. Now the Osprey leapt into the air as if stung.
From his right side seat in the cockpit, Wilson hadn’t seen what hit the ground, but he’d felt the impact. When he did, he added power to lift up and try to land again, as helicopter pilots often do when they aren’t happy with a landing. But as the Osprey got back up to fifteen feet or so, it truly seemed to have a mind of its own. The more Wilson tried to control it by moving the stick, the more out of control the Osprey got. From the tower, Schaefer and the engineers watched dumbstruck as Aircraft 5 moved away from the camera toward a concrete runway in the distance, staggering through the air like a drunk trying to walk a line. Inside the cockpit, Wilson’s brain was overloaded. He was wrestling with the stick, which by now was making the Osprey do the opposite of what Wilson was asking. When Wilson pushed the stick left, the Osprey rolled right; when he pushed the stick right, it rolled left. The wrestling match didn’t last long. The Osprey’s wing rolled wildly to the left, then wildly to the right, then back to the left so far that the left rotor dug into the concrete, spewing chunks of composite as its blades disintegrated. With the right rotor still intact and whirling, the Osprey performed a ghastly pirouette on its left nacelle, heeled over like a sinking ship, burrowed its nose into the runway, then plowed along with flames and black smoke pouring from underneath until it skidded to a stop.
Freisner’s left-side copilot seat was flush with the ground when they came to rest. He looked back toward the cabin and saw a gap where the fuselage had cracked open just behind the cockpit on his side.
“Grady, there’s a hole back here we can get out of!” Freisner shouted as he unbuckled his lap belt and shoulder harness. “Follow me!” Then Freisner scrambled out and ran.
Wilson was hanging nearly upside down. He heard Freisner yell to follow him, but Wilson’s training kicked in. Instead of following Freisner, Wilson jettisoned the cockpit window on his side, struggling with a metal handle until the glass popped out, then unstrapped and climbed out onto the overturned nose of the Osprey. He jumped about ten feet to the ground and stumbled away from the wreck to where Freisner was standing, next to a yellow fire truck whose crew had responded within seconds and was spraying foam on the fire. A giant column of black smoke was billowing up into the sky from the Osprey’s left side.
Wilson had some scrapes on his face, but his most severe injury was a badly bruised heel from jumping off the fallen Osprey. Freisner didn’t have a scratch. The fire crew put out the blaze quickly, but the aircraft itself would have to be written off. It had flown less than two minutes.
The next day, Navair suspended all Osprey flights pending an investigation. TV stations and newspapers around the nation were reporting on the accident. This was just the kind of publicity the Osprey didn’t need. Weldon tried to douse any sparks of doubt before they could ignite opposition. “The point of the prototypes is to work out any bugs or problems with the system,” he told the Delaware County Daily Times. “I’d rather it happen now than with Marines on board.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
SURVIVABILITY
Bell Helicopter test pilot Ron Erhart called Grady Wilson the day after the crash to see how he was. Except for a bad bruise on his heel, he was okay, Wilson said, but he was still trying to figure out why he’d nearly died in Aircraft 5. Something weird had been going on with the Osprey prototype’s controls. That was what started the trouble. Wilson told Erhart he thought he might have gotten it down safely, though, if not for the Blottle, as a lot of people called the Osprey’s power control. “I was going to plant it on the ground and I went the wrong way,” Wilson told his friend.
Officially called the Thrust Control Lever, or TCL, the Blottle worked like an airplane throttle, as Brigadier General Harry Blot had insisted it must when he ran the Osprey program for Navair in the late 1980s: you pushed it forward for more power and pulled it back for less. Bell and Boeing had wanted the TCL to work like a helicopter collective, as the power lever in the XV-15 did: you pulled it up and back for more power and pushed it down and forward for less. Most pilots will revert to training and instinct in an emergency, especially near the ground, where there’s often no time to think. When a veteran helicopter pilot gets into a situation like Wilson faced in Aircraft 5 and wants to land in a hurry, training and instinct say to “dump collective”—shove the power lever all the way forward. “This thing was ass-backwards to anything a helicopter guy had ever seen,” Wilson told me years later. A lot of what had happened in the cockpit the day of the crash was a blur to Wilson even when he and Erhart talked, and always would be. Wilson could never shake the feeling, though, that he might have suffered an attack of what some Osprey pilots called “collective dyslexia.” He would always suspect he had unconsciously tried to dump collective one of those times when he’d gotten Aircraft 5 close to the ground. That would explain why, to the surprise of those watching, the Osprey had hopped back up into the air. “I have no doubt that in my subconscious, and fighting it like that, I probably reverted to what I’d been trained to do,” Wilson told me. “Consciously, I don’t remember that.”
The Navy Department’s investigators didn’t blame the Blottle, or even mention it in their report. Aircraft 5’s strange behavior, they found, was caused by a device in the Osprey’s “fly-by-wire” flight control system called a “vyro.” A vyro is an electronic sensor, essentially a gyroscope, that measures an aircraft’s roll rate, meaning how fast it is rotating around its longitudinal axis, an imaginary line from its nose to its tail. A vyro sends signals to a flight control computer, which makes tiny rapid-fire adjustments to help keep the aircraft stable in flight, much as an auto driver unconsciously moves the steering wheel back and forth constantly to steer a straight line. The purpose of the vyros was to refine the commands given by the pilot moving the stick, and thus keep the Osprey stable.
As part of its “survivability” requirement—the military’s dictate that it be able to take enemy fire and keep flying—the Osprey had three sets of electronic flight controls, and those three sets of controls had one vyro each to measure the aircraft’s roll rate. If the signals sent by one of the three vyros contradicted the other two, the majority would rule; the two vyros that agreed with each other would “vote” the first off line. The investigation found that two of the three roll rate vyros in Aircraft 5 had been wired in reverse. This turned the prototype into an aircra
ft out of Bizarro World, the cube-shaped planet in the Superman comic books where all the rules are the reverse of Earth’s. When Wilson moved the stick left or right quickly, the aircraft rolled left or right slowly; when he moved the stick slowly, the aircraft rolled quickly. The two bad vyros were sensing Aircraft 5’s roll rate in reverse—reading slow as fast and fast as slow—and voting the good vyro off line. The effect was gradual at first, but as Wilson moved the stick faster and farther, frantically trying to gain control, his aircraft started doing nearly the opposite of what he intended. The stick ultimately got almost 180 degrees “out of phase,” as it’s called, so far out of sync that trying to bring Aircraft 5 under control was actually making it less stable.
Aircraft crash for many reasons, often because mundane things like FOD set in motion a sinister chain of events. FOD didn’t cause Aircraft 5 to crash, but inattention akin to what led to the FOD problem at Boeing’s flight test center did. The vyros were connected to the Osprey’s flight control computer by bulky bundles of wires—120 wires in each sapling-thick bundle. Errors were detected after the bundles were made in 1988 and rewiring was done as Boeing fabricated the cockpits of the prototypes. Work on Aircraft 5 was halted after its vyros were rewired, though, because Cheney had decided to cancel the Osprey. When that happened, whoever had rewired Aircraft 5’s vyros failed to fill out paperwork showing the task had been completed. When work resumed after Congress kept the Osprey alive, workers found an open order to reverse wires 59 and 60 on two of the prototype’s roll rate vyros. They did, undoing the correction made months earlier.
The Dream Machine Page 26