The Dream Machine

by Richard Whittle

  “How do you hear?” the controller asks again.

  “Yeah, stand by,” Murphy says, sounding stressed.

  Now the Osprey is at 1,375 feet and nosing over to the left. Murphy pulls his control stick back and right as far as it will go and holds it there. He tilts the nacelles down to zero degrees. Nothing helps. On the radio, the New River controller is saying “Seven miles from the runway . . .” when Murphy screams out Crossbow 08’s last transmission: “Declare emergency, we’re goin’ down, we’re goin’ down!”

  Thirty seconds after the first sign of trouble, Crossbow 08 screeches down into the darkness of Hofmann Forest and plows into the trees.

  * * *

  Sue Jarman heard the explosion. The men at the prayer meeting across Robert Smith’s field heard it, too. When they went outside, they could see flames shooting up out of the trees about a half mile into the forest. Stevie Jarman ran home. By the time he got there, Sue had already heard talk on her police scanner of a possible crash. “Possible nothin’, ” Sue said. “It has crashed. I heard it.” Stevie and some of the other men got into his four-wheel-drive pickup and headed into the forest. From the looks of the flames, the crash site was close, but there was no easy way to get there. The forest was dense and swampy; only a couple of roads ran through it. It was going to take a while to reach the crash.

  Sue phoned her youngest son, Chris, a twenty-six-year-old lineman for a power company, who lived two miles away. “No, I’m not kiddin’, ” she said. “That thing has crashed up there on the huntin’ club somewhere.” Chris ran to his truck and sped toward the forest.

  * * *

  Sergeant Michael Moffitt, who was looking forward to his scheduled flight that night with Major Bianca, had gone out to the flight line at New River about 7:30 to wait for Crossbow 08 to return. He’d been waiting outside for a while when it struck him that something was odd. Moffitt couldn’t hear any rotors turning, not a single one. He’d never heard the flight line so quiet. That made him wonder where Crossbow 08 was. He headed to the operations office in VMMT-204’s hangar to see what he could find out. When he got to the top of the stairs at one end of the hangar, Moffitt saw Major Paul Rock running down the hall the other way toward a stairwell at the other end of the building. Moffitt scurried back down the way he’d come, rushing into the hangar bay just in time to see Rock run into the maintenance control office. Rock looked pale. Moffitt followed him. By the time Moffitt got to the maintenance control office, Rock already had Crossbow 08’s maintenance records under one arm. One of the first things a squadron has to do after a crash is secure the aircraft’s maintenance records to make sure no one can tamper with them.

  “Something’s happened,” Rock told Moffitt hurriedly. “I think the aircraft went down, and another helicopter reported flames.” Rock rushed off.

  From his office upstairs, Rock phoned his wife, Maria. “I’m okay,” he said. “It’s going to be a long night. I’ll talk to you later.” Then he hung up. Rock was rushing to get out to the crash site. He was the only officer on duty that night trained in how to handle the aftermath of an accident. He knew what needed to be done. He had been through this before. At Marana.

  * * *

  Telephone lineman Chris Jarman found the crash site at 7:35 P.M. He was the first person to get near enough to see the fire, but it was a hundred yards or so back in the trees. Jarman pulled to a stop on Swamp Road, a rutted dirt track that runs through Hofmann Forest, and called his father, Stevie, on his CB radio. Soon Stevie and his friends arrived, followed by a convoy of five trucks driven by civilians who’d heard what was happening on their CBs. A couple of paramedics from the Jacksonville Volunteer Fire Department arrived next. They walked toward the fire to look for survivors, slogging their way through the mud and underbrush. A few minutes later, a search-and-rescue helicopter from the Marine Corps air station at Cherry Point, about thirty miles northeast, arrived overhead and went into a hover. Thinking the paramedics were survivors, the helicopter crew hoisted a Navy corpsman and a rescue swimmer to the ground.

  By now, civilian fire departments and rescue squads from all over the area were responding, along with the Camp Lejeune Fire Department, a fire unit from New River air station, the Onslow County Sheriff ’s Department, and the North Carolina State Highway Patrol. At 8 P.M., Rock phoned the Onslow County Emergency Operations Command to warn the civilian responders to wear respirators if they got near the Osprey’s wreckage. The smoke from burning composites was toxic. When Rock got to the scene, the remains of the Osprey were still on fire. No vehicles would get near it until after 9 P.M. that night, when a forest service bulldozer cleared a path from Swamp Road to where Cross-bow 08 had gone down. In the meantime, Marines and others, some in Tyvek suits and respirators, some not, were combing through the trees and underbrush, hoping to find survivors. Rock borrowed a respirator from a local firefighter and joined the search. There was still hope, he thought. The fire hadn’t consumed Crossbow 08 the way the blaze at Marana had engulfed the Osprey that went down there. Crossbow 08 was in pieces, but Rock could see its tail hung up in a tree off to the side from where the fuselage lay. From what he could see, the tail was largely intact. Who knew how hard they had hit? Maybe some of the crew had been thrown free and were lying in the woods, injured but alive. It was dark, it was smoky, it was hard to see through the mask of his respirator, but Rock didn’t want to give up. He knew Runnels and Buyck well, as good Marines. Sweaney had been Rock’s commander in the MOTT, and a mentor. Murphy was a close friend. Murf and Rock had flown together that awful night at Marana, driven back from Yuma, and worked the crash scene there for days. Just a month and a day ago tonight, they and some other VMMT-204 pilots, along with their wives, had adjourned to a room in the Atlantic Beach Sheraton down the road from New River after the Marine Corps Ball to continue the party. Murf and the others laughed like crazy when Rock put a heavy-metal song on and started playing air guitar, something he was prone to do after a few beers. Rock wanted to find his friends. He wanted to find them alive.

  After a couple of hours, it was clear that wasn’t going to happen.

  * * *

  The next morning at about eleven o’clock, Lieutenant General Fred McCorkle came to the Pentagon press briefing room. He’d been devastated when he was called the night before and told about the crash and who the pilots were. McCorkle considered Sweaney and Murphy both among his sons, though he’d known Murphy far longer, ever since he was a young lieutenant. Murphy had dropped by McCorkle’s office just two weeks earlier to say hello when business brought him to the Pentagon. Murphy and his wife, Tricia, had a twelve-year-old son, Michael Jr., and a seven-year-old daughter, Grace. After expressing condolences to the families of all four Marines killed, McCorkle announced that all Osprey flights were being suspended until the cause of the crash was determined. A decision on Full Rate Production was on hold, too, he added. “I met with Dr. Buchanan this morning, and after talking with the commandant, we have requested a delay in the decision to proceed with Milestone III, pending the results of additional information,” McCorkle said.

  After McCorkle provided some basics on what was known so far about the crash, a reporter asked a larger question. “General, is this program in deep trouble?”

  McCorkle wasn’t ready to concede that. That morning a senior civilian in the Pentagon had told him how he hadn’t had a car accident for seventeen years, then had two in quick succession, McCorkle said. Accidents happen, in other words. “We don’t know what was the cause of this yet,” McCorkle noted. “We plan on finding out what it was and fixing it.” The investigation had barely begun, but McCorkle seemed certain the cause had been something mechanical, not vortex ring state or pilot error. “If I flew with anyone, I think, out of the entire Marine Corps, where I’d be in the back, I’d want to be with Lieutenant Colonel Sweaney,” McCorkle said.

  The questions turned to whether the Marine Corps was going to get the Full Rate Production decision it had wanted for so lo
ng. McCorkle had been pushing to get that decision as hard as anyone. Now he acted unconcerned. “Originally, when we looked at this earlier in the year, we were looking at not doing a Milestone III decision until March or April of ’01,” he said. “So there’s a lot of time.”

  A reporter asked if this second crash, just eight months after Marana, combined with Pentagon test director Philip Coyle’s finding that the Osprey was “not operationally suitable,” might be “a showstopper.”

  “I don’t think it’ll be a showstopper,” McCorkle said. Coyle was talking about tests done with the first four production aircraft, McCorkle said, “where at times we had a tough time getting parts for them and things like that. So it was reliability and maintainability. But nobody has ever questioned the safety of this aircraft.”

  Another reporter wanted to know what the Marines would do if Milestone III were delayed a long time. Would they have to spend more money on their CH-46 helicopters? McCorkle refused to even consider the idea. “I think that we’re still going to have a Milestone III decision, it will just come at a later time,” he said. “I just don’t think that there’s any other aircraft out there anywhere for the money that would do the mission for the Marine Corps.”

  “And so without it—” a reporter began.

  McCorkle interrupted. “We don’t plan on doing without it,” he said.

  * * *

  For all the confidence McCorkle showed at his news briefing, he and everyone else at Headquarters Marine Corps knew that after the latest crash, the question might no longer be when the Osprey would pass Milestone III but whether it would get there at all. Two crashes within eight months made even General Jones, who was not only the commandant but a true believer in the tiltrotor, wonder if there was something inherently wrong with the technology. Whether there was or not, Jones knew the Marines had to satisfy the rest of the world that the Osprey wasn’t fatally flawed. In politics, especially in Washington, perception is reality. If the Osprey became perceived as unsafe, its support in Congress could erode, possibly even collapse. Jones also knew the Marines needed to act fast. After the presidential election a few weeks earlier, the political lineup in the capital was changing. Jones had a special relationship with the current defense secretary, Bill Cohen. They’d been friends for two decades, ever since Jones had served five years on Capitol Hill as a legislative liaison officer while Cohen was a Republican senator from Maine. When Cohen became defense secretary in 1997, he tapped Jones as his top military assistant. Two years later, Cohen got President Bill Clinton to make Jones commandant. Jones knew he and Cohen saw eye-to-eye on the Osprey. Both had long believed the tiltrotor could revolutionize military and civilian aviation. In a few weeks, though, the president would be George W. Bush and the vice president would be Dick Cheney, the Osprey’s old nemesis. A Supreme Court ruling on December 12, the day after the New River crash, had finally settled a dispute over Florida’s electoral votes and decided the election in the Bush-Cheney ticket’s favor. Soon a new set of civilian leaders would take over the Pentagon and a lot of new members of Congress would arrive on Capitol Hill. All many of them might know about the Osprey was what they had read in the newspapers or seen on TV. Who knew what their perceptions of the Osprey would be? Beyond that, Cheney would be back in power. During the campaign, Cheney had said he “probably would go forward with” the Osprey now, but that was before the New River crash.

  Less than twenty-four hours after the crash, Jones called Cohen and asked him to name a panel of experts to pass judgment on the Osprey, a so-called “Blue Ribbon Commission.” Cohen readily agreed. A commission was a time-honored way to deal with hot-potato issues in Washington. Rudy deLeon, the deputy secretary of defense, had suggested the idea to Jones. DeLeon said they should ask the director of the National Air and Space Museum, John Dailey, to head the commission. There was precedent for tapping the museum’s director for such a task, deLeon pointed out. In 1996, the Clinton administration had gotten Dailey’s predecessor at the museum, Donald Engen, to head a commission that studied the safety record of the White House military air fleet. Jones readily agreed to deLeon’s idea. Dailey was a retired four-star Marine Corps general who, as assistant commandant, had helped turn back Dick Cheney’s attempt to kill the Osprey a decade earlier.

  Initially, McCorkle was concerned when he heard Jones wanted a commission to study the Osprey. At first, he didn’t know who would be on the panel, and he knew that could make all the difference. Getting the Osprey through Milestone III had been one of McCorkle’s goals since he’d taken over Marine Corps aviation in 1998. Though a skeptic in the Osprey’s earliest days, McCorkle had been a believer in the tiltrotor for years now, as sure as anyone it was a dream machine for the Marine Corps. McCorkle had wanted the Osprey to go into service on his watch. A commission might take months to do its work, and who knew what it might decide? McCorkle was due to retire in the coming summer, and Milestone III was receding into the distance by the hour.

  The next day, something happened that added to McCorkle’s worries—and left him and Jones fuming. Mike Wallace, the star investigative reporter of CBS-TV’s 60 Minutes, called Keith Sweaney’s home and tried to speak to his widow, Carol. A friend who answered the phone refused to put Carol on the line. Wallace persisted. 60 Minutes was doing a story about the Osprey, he explained. He thought Carol might be interested in talking. The friend told Wallace it was outrageous for him to call at such a time. Then she hung up on him.

  The next day, Wallace sent Carol Sweaney a handwritten apology. “I’m deeply sorry if my telephone call to your home yesterday was an unwelcome intrusion, and in retrospect I can see that you and your friends could well have perceived it as such,” Wallace wrote. “Indeed, I suffered a similar intrusion myself when I lost a son, so I should have been more sensitive to what you’re going through. Your husband was— and is—held in such high regard by his colleagues in the Corps that I’m afraid it triggered an inappropriate reporter’s instinct. Sincerely, Mike Wallace.”

  McCorkle fired off his own letter to Wallace, denouncing his “predatory tactics.” General Jones sent a similar letter to the president of CBS News. The call to Sweaney’s widow before her husband’s remains had even been recovered from the wreckage of his aircraft, Jones wrote, “went beyond the pale of common decency.” A copy of Jones’s letter found its way to Howard Kurtz, media writer of the Washington Post. Kurtz wrote a story that ran January 3 under the headline, “Marines Blast Mike Wallace for ‘Insensitivity.’ ”

  Besides being irate with Wallace for making that call, the generals were worried by the revelation that Wallace was working on a story about the Osprey. A story by one of the other reporters in the 60 Minutes stable might be positive, maybe even a puff piece. Wallace didn’t often do puff pieces. Wallace usually did investigative stories, exposés. When he did them, they often generated similar stories in newspapers and other TV broadcasts. They could establish the conventional wisdom on the topic Wallace had investigated.

  Marine leaders had always put a high priority on dealing with the media. They had long understood that media coverage shapes public opinion, and if there is anything members of Congress pay attention to, it’s public opinion. Favorable media coverage was one way the Marines had sustained their high standing in public opinion over the years, and that standing was one reason for the Corps’ strong support in Congress. Strong support in Congress, in turn, had always been what saved the Corps when anyone started talking about disbanding or shrinking or folding it into the Army. Lawmakers with a vested interest in the Osprey—and there were plenty of them—could be relied on to defend the program almost no matter what. If public opinion turned against it, though, all bets might be off. The Marines, Bell-Boeing, and the Osprey’s supporters on Capitol Hill had already known they had a problem. The fact that 60 Minutes was preparing a story was a sign it might get worse.

  They had no idea how bad it was about to get.

  * * *

  Even before th
is latest crash, enlisted mechanics and others at VMMT-204 in New River had been getting letters, phone calls, or e-mails from Paul Gallagher, a 60 Minutes producer. Gallagher, who had started working on an Osprey story for Mike Wallace in mid-October, had gotten hold of a VMMT-204 roster that included home addresses and phone numbers. Some of those he contacted offered to help; some reported his calls to their supervisors. Squadron leaders cautioned enlisted maintainers against cooperating with 60 Minutes. No one can stop you from talking to them, they were told, but if you appear on TV in uniform, you’ll be in trouble.

  One twenty-two-year-old flight line mechanic in the squadron, Corporal Clifford Carlson, never got a letter from 60 Minutes, but Carlson was intrigued when he heard the show was working on a story about the Osprey. Carlson had disagreed with how maintenance statistics on the Osprey were handled during OPEVAL, when he was a member of the MOTT. Delays while parts were ordered from Bell and Boeing were sometimes excluded from the Osprey’s test scores, written off as irrelevant to whether the Osprey was ready for service, Carlson told me. The Osprey didn’t have a normal supply line yet, the logic went, so there was no need to figure such problems into OPEVAL test scores. Carlson thought that was wrong. After he got to VMMT-204, Carlson thought he saw similar things going on.