The Dream Machine

by Richard Whittle

  The squadron was under intense pressure from higher-ups to improve its readiness rate, a statistic showing how many of its Ospreys were ready to fly each day. After November, when Pentagon test director Coyle’s report on OPEVAL declared the Osprey “not operationally suitable” because of poor reliability, the aviation branch of the Marine Corps was eager to show that the maintenance record was improving rapidly. Making that case might be important when Assistant Secretary of the Navy H. Lee Buchanan III decided whether to approve Milestone III and put the Osprey into Full Rate Production. On November 21, four days after Coyle issued his report, one of McCorkle’s top assistants, Brigadier General James Amos, sent McCorkle an e-mail on the subject. Showing better maintenance and reliability figures was going to be difficult, Amos warned. His e-mail said the most recent figures from VMMT-204 were “a bad story,” partly because the squadron was one of three in the Marine Corps using a new computerized maintenance reporting system.

  The new system was stricter than the old one in recording when an aircraft was mechanically “down,” meaning not flyable. Everybody in Marine Corps aviation knew that squadrons of all types had been gaming the old system for years to improve their readiness rates. Under the old system, there were ways to list an aircraft as “up”—flyable—even if it was “down” for maintenance or repair. The status of a down aircraft, for example, might be changed to up as soon as the parts it needed were in hand and were being installed, rather than waiting until the aircraft actually was ready to fly again. The new system couldn’t be manipulated that way, so long as accurate data on what work and parts were needed for a particular aircraft was entered into the computer. Based on those entries, the computer automatically declared an aircraft’s status, often in ways that made no sense to mechanics and maintenance officers. Under the new system, the numbers on how many Ospreys at VMMT-204 were rated “mission capable” or “full mission capable” on any given day were awful.

  “Sir . . . this needs to be close-held,” Amos wrote to McCorkle. Under the new reporting system, “which you can’t cheat on,” Amos noted, VMMT-204’s mission-capable rate for the month of November had averaged 26.7 percent, far below the Osprey’s published daily average goal of 75 percent. Its full-mission-capable rate was a mere 7.9 percent. “Had hoped to be able to use some recent numbers next month when you meet with Dr. Buchanan for his Milestone III/FRP decision in December . . . this isn’t going to help,” Amos concluded.

  The disappointment with VMMT-204’s readiness rate at headquarters grew in importance as it filtered down the ranks. Major General Dennis Krupp, commander of the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing in North Carolina, had been firing off e-mails for months to subordinates at New River and managers at Bell-Boeing complaining about the poor readiness rates at VMMT-204. After Krupp saw Amos’s Nov. 21 e-mail to McCorkle, Krupp e-mailed a subordinate, Colonel James Schleining, telling him to “see if we can put a positive spin on the month of Oct/Nov. Apparently they are in a sh.. sandwich in DC regarding FRP decision.” Two hours later, Schleining e-mailed the commander of VMMT-204, Lieutenant Colonel Odin “Fred” Leberman, telling him Krupp wanted to “see if we can put a positive spin on” the Osprey’s readiness rates. Schleining explained that McCorkle “needs some help on the FRP decision.”

  The decision on Full Rate Production was a matter of high policy in Washington. Soon, though, even privates and corporals at VMMT-204 were talking about how important it was to get readiness rates up so the Osprey could pass Milestone III. “We clearly could feel the pressure from higher headquarters of pushing this thing to get it to Full Rate Production,” recalled former Staff Sergeant Julius Banks, a senior non-commissioned officer in VMMT-204 at the time. “I think at that time everyone knew that the aircraft had a lot of deficiencies, but the thought was, we’ll get the aircraft to Full Rate Production, we’ll get the Congress to approve, and we’ll fix the airplanes later.”

  After the crash on December 11, all Ospreys were grounded. To keep those at VMMT-204 in shape mechanically, though, crews were still running their engines, even taxiing around. The squadron’s Ospreys still needed maintenance and repairs, and the pressure to show better readiness rates didn’t let up. Flight line mechanic Corporal Cliff Carlson grew even more bitter than he had been before the crash. Staff Sergeant Avely Runnels and Sergeant Jason Buyck, the two crew chiefs killed in the accident, had been friends of his. While Carlson was on leave to attend Runnels’ funeral, a friend at VMMT-204 called and told him the assistant maintenance officer, Captain Christopher Ramsey, had met with some of the mechanics and told them they needed to make the Osprey’s readiness rate look better. Ramsey would later deny it, but Carlson’s friend said the officer had told the mechanics they needed to be “smarter” in using the new system. Ramsey asked for suggestions, Carlson’s friend said, and also made one. If an aircraft came in on a Friday with a “squawk”—a maintenance need—that would down it, the mechanics should wait until Monday to enter that information into the computerized reporting system. The work wouldn’t get done over the weekend anyway, and the readiness rate would look that much better if the aircraft was listed as up those extra two days. Those in the meeting also decided they would start recording aircraft needing work that would down them as up in the computer, but add the symbol *D* in one of the information fields on the reporting form. “We literally had officers telling maintenance personnel that if the aircraft is—if there’s a grounding write-up on the aircraft, we’re not going to call it a grounding write-up, we’ll call it an up write-up until we can get past Full Rate Production,” Banks told me. “It was nasty back then.”

  Carlson was outraged when he heard about Ramsey’s meeting. With no Ospreys flying, there was no risk that inaccurate maintenance reporting would cause a crash, but the officers were encouraging the maintainers to fudge the numbers, as Carlson saw it. Whose hide would it be if they got caught? During OPEVAL, Carlson had bought a microcassette tape recorder and surreptitiously taped meetings on maintenance data. He did it to protect himself if anyone ever accused him of falsifying results. When he got back from Runnels’s funeral, Carlson took his tape recorder to work.

  A couple of days later, VMMT-204’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel Leberman, called a meeting of maintainers for December 29, the Friday before New Year’s weekend. Carlson slipped his tape recorder into the pocket of his flight jacket and wore it into the meeting. When Leberman started talking, Carlson started taping.

  The squadron needed to get its readiness rate up, Leberman said, and the new reporting system was a problem. With the old system, Leberman said, it was possible to “screw with the data a little bit,” but the new system “does not let us lie. The problem is, we have it here and we need to lie. And the reason we need to lie—or, or manipulate the data, or however you want to call it—is that until Milestone III comes along, and Milestone III being a Full Rate Production decision, this program is in jeopardy.”

  Over the next twelve days, VMMT-204 reported to higher headquarters that the readiness rate of its Ospreys each day was 100 percent.

  Carlson made five copies of his recording of Leberman’s meeting. He took one each to Runnels’s and Buyck’s widows. He put the other three in brown manila envelopes, along with an anonymous letter describing himself as a mechanic with VMMT-204. “What we have been doing is reporting aircrafts that are down, as in they can’t fly, as being up, as in full mission capable,” Carlson wrote. “This type of deception has been going on for over 2 years, however this is the first time it will affect safety. During the test period maintenance records were accurate and the test report writers would just throw out the data they didn’t like. Now, maintainers are being told they have to lie on maintenance records to make the numbers look good. This is not what caused the previous 2 mishaps this year, but if it continues it will cause many more.” Carlson enclosed a copy of VMMT-204’s Aircraft Daily Status Report for December 29– January 2 and photos of a whiteboard where the squadron’s maintenance control de
partment listed the actual status of each Osprey. The daily status report showed every Osprey up, he said. “The pictures show a different story though. Everything written in red is a downer, meaning the plane cannot fly. This is how we have been doing business, not documenting downers and just noting them on the board. This is illegal.” Carlson mailed one package to the Naval Air Systems Command and another to the secretary of the Navy. He mailed the third to 60 Minutes.

  * * *

  Besides trying to reach Carol Sweaney, CBS reporter Mike Wallace also called Connie Gruber, whose husband, Major Brooks “Chucky” Gruber, had been the copilot killed at Marana. A petite, pretty brunette whose stepfather was a retired Marine Corps sergeant major, Connie had met her husband in 1990, the day after Thanksgiving. At the time, Brooks was a first lieutenant flying CH-53 helicopters in a squadron at New River. Connie was a first-grade teacher in a school for dependents at Camp Lejeune. Mutual friends introduced them, and Connie fell in love with Brooks the moment she saw him. His big, warm smile put her at ease right away. Brooks later told Connie he liked her eyes. A year later, after Brooks came back from flying in the Gulf War, he gave Connie a sweetheart necklace, two hearts looped together, with small diamonds in the middle of each heart. On Valentine’s Day 1992, they dressed up to drive to Raleigh, the state capital, for dinner. When they got to the restaurant, Brooks produced a dozen roses from somewhere, then dropped to one knee and asked Connie to marry him. “Yes!” she screamed. The rest of the evening, all Connie could do was look at the ring, then look at Brooks, her dream come true. They married on December 12 of that year at the First Baptist Church in Jacksonville, North Carolina, after Brooks returned from a six-month deployment to the Mediterranean. They moved to New Mexico, then to Florida after Brooks started flying as the Marine Corps’ only exchange pilot with the Air Force’s 20th Special Operations Squadron. When Brooks was selected to fly the Osprey with the MOTT, they moved near Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland. On July 25, 1999, Connie gave birth to a daughter. They named her Brooke, for her father. That fall, just before Operational Evaluation of the Osprey began, Brooks moved Connie and the baby to Jacksonville, North Carolina. After OPEVAL, Brooks was scheduled to join VMMT-204 at nearby New River. The last time Connie ever saw him was in Jacksonville on Valentine’s Day 2000, the eighth anniversary of their engagement. It was the day Brooks left to go west with the MOTT. Connie hated to say good-bye. That weekend, she had walked into the baby’s room as Brooks looked down lovingly at their six-month-old daughter.

  “You know,” Brooks said, looking up at Connie, “that baby is me and you.”

  “I know,” Connie said. “She is the greatest gift you have ever given me, and the greatest gift God has ever given us.”

  Connie Gruber never forgot that precious moment. Nor could she get over losing Brooks. She couldn’t look at the moon without wondering if that was the last thing he’d seen before his Osprey plunged into the ground at Marana. She often awoke with a start at 3 a.m., the hour her living nightmare had begun on April 9, 2000, when a Marine Corps casualty assistance officer had come to the door to tell her Brooks had been killed. She couldn’t bear to hear or read that his Osprey had crashed because of “pilot error,” as some news accounts had said or implied. She knew her husband and John Brow were two of the finest pilots in the Marine Corps. The blame for their crash had to lie with the aircraft, not the pilots. Connie Gruber didn’t hesitate when Mike Wallace called and asked if she would appear on 60 Minutes. It was a chance to set the record straight.

  * * *

  When 60 Minutes producer Paul Gallagher received Corporal Cliff Carl-son’s anonymous package on January 5, 2001, he felt like a slot machine player who’d hit a jackpot. “Wow,” Wallace said when Gallagher told him what he had. Wallace already had conducted a number of interviews for his story. Now they wanted to get it on the air as soon as possible, before some other news organization, or the Marines, went public with the anonymous mechanic’s allegations. Wallace, Gallagher, and the show’s executive producer, Don Hewitt, had a long discussion about when to call the Marine Corps for comment. They were worried that if they called too soon, the Marines might somehow undermine their scoop. They decided Wallace would make that call on the Wednesday before their Sunday evening 60 Minutes broadcast, scheduled for January 21. The evening of January 17, Wallace phoned Leberman and told him about the tape. Leberman declined to comment. Then Wallace called the general in charge of Marine Corps Public Affairs and told him what 60 Minutes had. The general said the Marines would have no comment.

  The next morning, the Marine Corps inspector general, Major General Timothy Ghormley, arrived at New River with a team of seven investigators. The investigators seized computer hard drives and documents at VMMT-204 and started interviewing the squadron’s 241 members. Later that day, Leberman was relieved as the squadron’s commander. Afterward, the Pentagon issued a news release announcing that General Jones had directed an investigation into allegations that the commanding officer of VMMT-204 had “asked Marines to falsify maintenance records on the squadron’s MV-22 Osprey aircraft.” The release said that “Marine Corps officials first became aware of these allegations Jan. 12, when they received a copy of an anonymous letter and audio tape that was mailed to the Office of the Secretary of the Navy.” While the investigation had just begun, “at this point there appears to be no relation between these allegations and the causes of either the April 8 mishap in Marana, Ariz., or the Dec. 11 mishap in North Carolina.”

  Wallace appeared on the CBS Evening News that night, introduced by anchor Dan Rather. “A new shock tonight for one of the most controversial and troubled weapons programs ever undertaken by the military, the V-22 Osprey, a radical, innovative aircraft that takes off like a helicopter and flies like a plane,” Rather began. “Under pressure, the Marine Corps ousted the commander of an Osprey training squadron and opened an investigation of accusations that he’s told squadron members to falsify aircraft maintenance records. CBS News 60 Minutes correspondent Mike Wallace is working this story, and he breaks tonight exclusive details. Mike.”

  “Dan,” Wallace began, “the Marine Corps has been hiding the truth about the Osprey from the American public for months now.” Wallace reported that “four Ospreys have crashed out of a fleet of fifteen,” and that Leberman had “told his men they should continue to ‘lie’—his word—about maintenance problems with the aircraft.” Wallace said the Marines had refused to talk to him about the Osprey. “It seems apparent that the Marine Corps is deeply embarrassed by the cover-up of the failures of the Osprey’s technology, especially since the Pentagon is asking for $30 billion to purchase 360 Ospreys for the Marine Corps. Their announcement late this afternoon of an investigation into the whole matter appears to be a pre-emptive strike to blunt the reaction to the report we’ll air on 60 Minutes this coming Sunday night.”

  Lieutenant General McCorkle came to the Pentagon press briefing room the next day. He told the roomful of reporters he’d intended to offer an update on the investigation into the New River crash, but now he also wanted to “share with you the Marine Corps’ concerns on the recent allegations” that maintenance records at VMMT-204 had been falsified. “Although the MV-22 is very important to the future of the Marine Corps, nothing’s more important than the safety of our Marines and the integrity of our Corps,” McCorkle said. “Based on all of the information that we have,” there was no evidence of a connection between the alleged falsification of maintenance records and the crashes at Marana and New River, he said. “In fact, the anonymous letter, which you’ll be given a copy of, specifically states that this was not what caused the previous two mishaps.” The preliminary results of the New River crash investigation indicated that Crossbow 08 had crashed because of “a hydraulic system failure followed by an error in software inputs to the flight control system.” Using a diagram of Crossbow 08’s final flight pattern laid over a map of the area where it crashed, McCorkle went through a rough outlin
e of the last thirty seconds of the flight, from the failure of Hydraulic System One to Crossbow 08’s final radio transmission. Then he took questions.

  The first was whether the hydraulic failure in Crossbow 08 was related to maintenance.

  “It’s not possibly related to maintenance, and it’s going to end up as a [hydraulic] line that was rubbed through, which we have on aircraft almost one a day in the Marine Corps and in other services,” McCorkle said.

  The next reporter asked a question on a lot of minds. Critics of the Osprey “have already started to say that this is more evidence that this is a bad program, it ought to be cancelled because of the cost, because of Mr. Coyle’s report about the maintenance and reliability question. Do you—are you afraid that politically this program may be on its way down as well?”

  “I’m not,” McCorkle said, “and for the reason that I think that what’s going to be shown in this hydraulics failure has zero to do with technology with the tiltrotor or with the MV-22.”

  When a reporter asked if the investigation of VMMT-204 wasn’t politically damaging, though, McCorkle acknowledged the obvious. “Anything that’s bad is politically damaging, and the accident itself is politically damaging,” he said.

  Just how politically damaging the events of the past five weeks had been soon became evident.