Even Navair’s Osprey program office acknowledged it would take at least a year or more after Full Rate Production was approved to get the aircraft up to minimum standards on the ilities. Problems with spare parts, bugs in the Osprey’s computerized maintenance system, and other deficiencies had kept the MOTT from meeting its OPEVAL goals. The inspector general’s report suggested the tests should have been postponed until the Osprey was ready. “The desire to meet milestones resulted in demands being made to complete operational test and evaluation quickly . . . rather than delaying the program and risk losing the funding,” the report concluded.
About the time that report was released, all eleven Ospreys in use were grounded for a week after one flown by VMMT-204 at New River made a precautionary landing at nearby Camp Lejeune. A coupling in its driveshaft had come loose, so the driveshafts of all Ospreys were inspected. The grounding didn’t slow the Osprey’s political momentum, though. On September 7, former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, now Republican presidential nominee George W. Bush’s vice presidential running mate, made a campaign stop in Wayne, Pennsylvania, eighteen miles from Boeing Helicopter Company in Ridley Park. Someone asked Cheney what he thought about the Osprey. “We’re committed now, and we’ve made a significant upfront investment, and if I had to sit down today and decide what our needs are and given the status of the program, I’d probably go forward with it,” Cheney said. Over the past eighteen years, the Pentagon had spent $10 billion designing, redesigning, and buying Ospreys. Navair’s latest estimate was that it would cost $28 billion more to finish buying all 458 planned.
A few weeks later, despite the disappointing results in the MOTT’s report, the Navy’s Operational Test and Evaluation Force declared that the Osprey had passed OPEVAL and was “operationally effective” and “operationally suitable,” two legal standards a major new piece of defense equipment must meet. All the Marines needed now was for the Pentagon’s operational test and evaluation director, Coyle, to agree. If he did, the way would be clear for the assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development, and acquisition, the final authority on whether the Osprey was ready for Full Rate Production, to approve Milestone III.
Coyle didn’t. On November 17, he issued his own report on OPEVAL. Coyle found the Osprey “operationally effective” but “not operationally suitable.” By law, to be found “operationally effective,” a piece of defense equipment had to be able to perform the missions it was designed to do. To be “operationally suitable,” it had to be reliable and easy enough to maintain to meet minimum availability rates. Based on the Osprey’s maintenance problems during OPEVAL, Coyle said the aircraft wasn’t reliable yet and needed too many mechanics to keep it running. Coyle didn’t say so in his report, but he couldn’t understand why the Navy’s Operational Test and Evaluation Force had declared the Osprey operationally suitable. During OPEVAL, the Ospreys flown by the MOTT had suffered twenty-seven failures of swashplate actuators, mechanical devices that raise and lower the pitch, or angle, of rotor blades, his report noted. “Failures related to the hydraulic system deserve special mention,” Coyle’s report said. To help hold down the Osprey’s bulk and weight, its designers had been forced to use titanium hydraulic lines under 5,000 pounds per square inch of pressure, which were thinner and lighter than the 3,000-psi hydraulic lines customarily used in helicopters. The higher pressure “places great stress on hydraulic seals,” Coyle’s report said, noting that the four Ospreys flown by the MOTT had suffered 170 hydraulic failures during OPEVAL.
Coyle’s report created a problem for the Marines. On December 5, six days before Sweaney headed to New River, the Navy Department held a meeting to decide whether to approve Milestone III and put the Osprey into Full Rate Production. Navair officials went into the meeting expecting H. Lee Buchanan III, the assistant secretary of the Navy authorized to make the decision, to give the Osprey a green light. Buchanan didn’t. After listening to a briefing on where things stood, he wasn’t persuaded the Osprey was ready, given its maintenance record. He asked for another briefing in two weeks and postponed a decision. Suddenly, whether the Marines were going to get the Osprey past Milestone III in time to field it in 2001 was looking iffy.
* * *
The Osprey that Keith Sweaney was supposed to use for his first flight at New River on December 11 had a maintenance problem, which delayed his schedule for a second time that day. Sweaney’s plans had changed once already because another pilot called in sick. That wasn’t unusual, but something else that happened that day was.
About 3 P.M., not long after Sweaney got out of a preflight briefing, his fifteen-year-old daughter, Katrina, called on his cell phone. Katrina had never done that before when her father was scheduled to fly. Today, though, she had a weird feeling. Nothing vivid, just a premonition. She hadn’t had a bad dream the night before or anything. She just had a feeling something bad might happen to her dad.
“Hi, what are you doing?” her father said.
“I just got home from school. I wanted to make sure you got to work okay,” Katrina told him.
“I did.”
Katrina wanted to tell her father about her bad feeling, ask him not to fly today. Once she heard his voice, though, she couldn’t bring herself to do it. I’m just being weird, she thought. Now she was unsure what to say, so after an awkward pause, she told her dad she’d taught a new trick to their year-old chocolate Labrador retriever, Koko.
“That’s great,” Sweaney said. Katrina could tell he was in a hurry.
“Do you want me to have Mom call you when she gets in?” she asked.
“No,” her father said. “Tell Mom I’ll call her when I get done flying. I love you. Talk to you later.”
Those who love people who can lose their lives on the job, like the people who do such jobs, often suffer premonitions. Even if Katrina had told her father about hers, he surely would have flown. No Osprey pilot in the Marine Corps had more reason to shrug off such things. Sweaney had 271 flight hours in the Osprey, more than any other pilot in the Corps. He had made his last flight forty days earlier, though, and his last night flight way back on July 12, so today he was scheduled to make a daylight refresher flight. The pilot in command would be his former subordinate Major Michael L. “Murf ” Murphy, a big, smiley Irish-American, a New York City cop’s son so gregarious the guys in the MOTT called him “The Mayor.” Murphy, thirty-eight, was now a VMMT-204 instructor. Under the original plan, Sweaney was supposed to do his day hop, then give his seat to a major. Murphy would coach the major as he practiced landing the Osprey in a confined area after dark using night-vision goggles. When the other major called in sick, Colonel Richard Dunnivan, who was slated to take command of VMMT-204 in January, was put on the schedule. Dunnivan, who had never flown an Osprey except in a simulator, was itching to get behind the controls. Murphy suggested Dunnivan take Sweaney’s daylight flight and let Sweaney do the night hop instead. Regulations said a pilot had to have flown a day hop within fifteen days before piloting a night flight, but given Sweaney’s experience, the rules could be bent, it was decided. Sweaney would “hot seat” with Dunnivan—take his place—when Dunnivan and Murphy landed.
Murphy and Dunnivan were scheduled to take off at 3:30 P.M., but when they walked out to the flight line to get into their aircraft, Staff Sergeant Julius Banks told them they’d have to get another Osprey. A preflight check on the one they were supposed to use had found a missing fastener on the wing, potential foreign object debris that could cause damage if the fastener were rattling around somewhere in the aircraft. Banks told the crew chiefs who would fly with Murphy that day, Staff Sergeant Avely Runnels and Sergeant Jason Buyck, to find the next aircraft scheduled. The next Osprey was already on the flight line, just refueled after a training flight. When Murphy started it up, though, a malfunction in the nose wheel steering mechanism posted on the cockpit display, and Murphy declared the aircraft “down,” not flyable. By then, the first Osprey had passed an inspection for the mis
sing fastener and been cleared to fly, so Murphy and Dunnivan got into that one. The aircraft was nearly new, the eighth LRIP Osprey, so it had “08” painted on its side. It would fly under the radio call sign “Crossbow 08.”
By the time Murphy and Dunnivan took off in Crossbow 08, it was 4:41 P.M. The shortness of the late fall daylight hours meant there wouldn’t be enough time for Dunnivan to complete an entire day familiarization flight, so Sweaney hung around the VMMT-204 ready room, waiting his turn. When Murphy and Dunnivan landed just over half an hour later, Sweaney met them on the tarmac. Dunnivan climbed out of the Osprey’s right seat and stepped into the back cabin. He was elated. Murphy had let him do everything: taxi out, do a rolling takeoff, convert the nacelles a couple of times, come back in and land. Flying the Osprey for the first time had been a thrill. Dunnivan was all smiles as Sweaney came aboard and squeezed into the right pilot seat. Dunnivan leaned in and helped him straighten the straps of his shoulder harness, plugged in his radio and night-vision goggles for him, handed him a kneeboard for maps and notes, then tapped him on the helmet. “See ya,” Dunnivan said. Murphy was in the left seat, his night-vision goggles perched on his head as he set up the cockpit for night flight.
Sergeant Michael Moffitt, who like Banks had been a crew chief on the lead Osprey at Marana, was standing a few yards from the VMMT-204 hangar, smoking a cigarette, as crew chiefs Runnels and Buyck rushed around the open back ramp of Crossbow 08 preparing it to fly. Runnels and Buyck, who pronounced his name “bike,” were good friends with each other, and Moffitt considered them two of his best buddies in VMMT-204. Everybody liked Runnels, twenty-five, a Georgia boy who would do anything for a laugh. Buyck, twenty-four, was a tall, shy kid from Sodus, New York, a town on Lake Ontario. Other guys in the squadron liked to mess with Buyck just because he seemed bashful.
As Crossbow 08 started moving, Runnels and Buyck jumped up on the back ramp and looked in Moffitt’s direction. Moffitt gave them the finger. They gave him the finger back. Moffitt was pumped up that afternoon. After the crash at Marana, he had refused to fly in an Osprey for months but started again after he transferred to VMMT-204. Tonight, after Crossbow 08 came back from this flight, Moffitt was scheduled to go up in it with Major Buddy Bianca, the copilot on the lead aircraft at Marana. It would be the first time Bianca and Moffitt had flown together since that awful night in Arizona.
* * *
At 5:39 P.M., Murphy and Sweaney take off on what will be their last flight ever. Slightly less than an hour later, with the Osprey’s rotors in airplane mode, they contact the New River air traffic controller from eleven miles out and request permission to practice radar landing approaches to the field. The technique is to tilt the rotors upward gradually while approaching, as if preparing to land, then tilt them forward again and circle around. Sweaney does two practice approaches. Murphy takes the controls and does a third. Then, at 7:18 P.M., Murphy tilts Crossbow 08’s rotors forward to airplane mode, accelerates to 160 knots—about 185 miles per hour—and climbs to 1,400 feet, heading north so they can approach New River’s Runway 19 from that direction and land into the wind. A minute later, they’re at 1,600 feet and 180 knots as the tower begins dictating a series of left turns to put them on their approach path. They tell the tower they’re going to land this time. Four minutes pass as the tower guides them by radio, watching on radar as they turn over the southern edge of Hofmann Forest, an 80,000-acre tract of pine woods and swampland that starts a half a dozen miles north of New River and the nearby city of Jacksonville, North Carolina. As they bank slightly left and turn to 230 degrees, a southwest heading, Murphy reduces power and Crossbow 08’s automatic flight control system begins raising the nacelles. Then a caution light posts on their cockpit display. hyd ? fail, it says. In their Osprey’s left nacelle, one of the pencil-thin titanium hydraulic lines, its fluid under 5,000 pounds per square inch of pressure, has just sprung a leak. Two seconds later, Hydraulic System One, one of three in the Osprey, shuts down.
* * *
Stevie Jarman and his wife, Sue, lived on five acres nestled against the southwest edge of Hofmann Forest. Afternoons and evenings, Sue liked to sit on a love seat next to the sliding glass doors of their modular home, a roomy double-wide, and crochet while she listened to police and fire calls on her CB radio. The glass doors looked out on a pretty, 25-acre field where their neighbor, Robert Smith, usually grew corn. Stevie Jarman was assistant fire chief in Jacksonville but nearing retirement. He spent a lot of time in Hofmann Forest, where a group of friends and relatives leased 2,500 acres from a paper company to hunt deer, quail, doves, wild turkey, whatever was in season. This evening, no one is in the forest. It’s cold, drizzly, and past dark. Stevie is across the field at a neighbor’s home for a men’s dinner and Baptist prayer meeting, same as every Monday. Sue puts down her needlework as she hears a strange noise, an uneven whirring, something like an electric fan with a bad blade, only ten times louder. The sound grows louder and louder, rising in a crescendo that begins to rattle the sliding glass doors. Soon the whole mobile home is shaking. “That thing sounds like it’s gonna crash,” Sue says aloud. When she does, a shudder passes through her. One night just a week ago, Sue suddenly remembers, she dreamed about an aircraft crashing. Right there in Robert Smith’s field.
* * *
By the time Sue Jarman hears that whirring sound, Keith Sweaney and Michael Murphy are no longer flying Crossbow 08 so much as fighting to keep it airborne. The flight control system has gone haywire. Three seconds after the hyd ? fail caution posts in the cockpit, the New River controller radios Crossbow 08 and gets no response. A second after that, as their nacelles tilt up to nine degrees, another caution posts: hyd ?/? fail.
The Osprey has three hydraulic systems, a redundancy created to meet its survivability requirements. If one system fails, the other two are supposed to keep the aircraft flying. Hydraulic System One and Hydraulic System Two work in tandem, powering the Osprey’s flight control actuators, devices that resemble automobile shock absorbers. The actuators move the mechanical parts that raise and lower the pitch of the rotor blades and power other control surfaces, such as the tail rudders. Hydraulic System Three has a separate set of primary tasks. It powers the landing gear, the rear ramp, the blade fold/wing stow system and other moving parts that don’t affect flight. Hydraulic System Three, though, also backs up Systems One and Two, taking over for either one if electronic sensors detect a failure in them. For the most part, the three hydraulic systems are independently routed. To back up Systems One and Two, though, System Three has to join them at certain points so it can take over their work. One such point is inside the nacelles, just before the hydraulic lines enter the actuators that power the swashplates, the leverlike mechanisms that change the angles of the rotor blades. Crossbow 08 has sprung a leak in that line, about two inches beyond where Hydraulic System One and System Three join. Within seconds, all hydraulic fluid in System One is lost. A fail-safe mechanism in System Three shuts off the flow of fluid before it gets to the leak point. This is why the cockpit display flashes hyd ?/? fail. Now, in the left nacelle, only Hydraulic System Two is powering the swashplate actuators. A new caution posts: critical swpl fault—“critical swashplate fault.” With that, an automatic system for tilting the nacelles disengages and the rotors stop at 11 degrees. This all happens in six seconds.
The New River controller radios again, ending with “how do you hear?” The pilots are too busy to talk. Their aircraft has just told them its flight controls are failing and they’re only 1,600 feet above ground. They have life-or-death decisions to make. In a hurry. In a darkened cockpit. Wearing night-vision goggles. With a shrill warning tone— “deedle-eedle-eedle-eedle-eedle”—sounding in their earphones. On the glare shield, a sort of dashboard in front of them, an inch-square button labeled pfcs fail/reset—Primary Flight Control System Fail/Reset— blinks on red. The hyd ?/? fail caution has illuminated it. Sweaney and Murphy know that the Osprey’s display screens often po
st cautions and advisories that aren’t real, just computer hiccups. Standard operating procedure is to reset the PFCS when certain faults deemed “critical” post to see if they clear or post again. If a critical fault posts again, the pilot is supposed to land as soon as possible. Eight seconds after the first hydraulic fault posts, one of the pilots pushes the PFCS reset button.
The effect is disastrous. The faults come back. Worse still, pushing the button doesn’t just reset the displays. Against all logic, it takes the pitch of the rotor blades flat, reducing the angle at which they hit the air. That robs the blades of most of their thrust and slows the aircraft as if someone had jammed on the brakes. When that happens, Crossbow 08’s nose pitches up, the pilots are thrown forward, and Murphy—probably involuntarily—pushes the control stick and thrust control lever forward. The engines overspeed with the rotor blades at flat pitch. A governor cued by the Osprey’s rotor speed signals the swashplate actuators to restore the blades to their previous angle. With only one hydraulic system working in the left nacelle, though, the left nacelle’s swashplate actuators are like a man trying to lift a barbell with one hand tied behind his back. The blades on the right rotor regain their pitch far faster than the blades on the left. With greater pitch, the blades on the right rotor create more thrust, so the Osprey’s nose whips left and Crossbow 08 rolls in that direction. Murphy sticks the nose back right to level off. As he does, cautions and advisories light up the cockpit display like fireworks. In big, white, block letters, the panel virtually screams at Sweaney and Murphy in rapid succession: l & r torque sensor flt—load limit flt—multi swpl fault—r&l fadec b turbine overspeed—r&l eng np overspeed. Nothing in their training has prepared the pilots for this. One of them pushes the PFCS reset button again. The rotor blades lose their pitch and regain it at different speeds again. The Osprey slows, speeds up, yaws left. The last three faults post again. One of the pilots pushes PFCS reset again. The blades lose their pitch and regain it at different speeds again. The Osprey slows, speeds up, yaws left. By now, Crossbow 08 is whipsawing through the air, slamming the pilots forward and backward, left and right, more and more violently, at as much as twice the force of gravity. As the Osprey bucks, it loses altitude and speed. For some reason—maybe wishful thinking, maybe by accident as they try to brace themselves—the pilots hit the PFCS reset button again and again, at least nine times within twenty-two seconds. Murphy pushes and pulls the thrust control lever back and forth from zero to full power and jerks the control stick from side to side, maybe trying to get the Osprey under control, more likely because he’s being whipped back and forth and side-to-side. By now, Crossbow 08’s gyrations are slinging him and Sweaney around like rag dolls. Only their lap belts and shoulder harnesses keep them in their seats.
The Dream Machine Page 38