The Dream Machine

by Richard Whittle

  On Friday, the day after McCorkle’s press briefing, Associated Press Pentagon correspondent Robert Burns, citing a “senior official,” reported that Leberman had admitted asking subordinates to falsify maintenance records. The same day, the Council for a Livable World, a Washington think tank often opposed to major defense programs, issued a statement under the heading “Arrested Development: Troubled Osprey Should be Canceled.” The group’s president, John Isaacs, said the allegations of maintenance reporting fraud “illustrate the severity of the Osprey’s many technical problems and the Pentagon’s flawed procurement process.” Isaacs predicted it would be “difficult for the Osprey to recover from this. The program has always been of questionable military value, but its strong congressional backing made it the Teflon weapon—no criticism could stick. But now that political cover is coming off.”

  On Saturday, George W. Bush was inaugurated as president of the United States. The next morning, an editorial in the New York Times said Bush’s defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, should find out whether Leberman had acted on his own or with “the blessings of superior officers.” As for the Osprey itself, the editorial said, “Dick Cheney rightly tried to cancel the Osprey program while he was defense secretary.” It was rare for programs to be halted once they had gone into production, as the Osprey had, the Times noted, but “now it may be time to terminate the program altogether. The Bush administration’s expensive plans to build 21st Century weapons leave no room for a 20-year-old idea with a poor safety record and maintenance data of questionable reliability.”

  That evening, CBS broadcast Wallace’s 60 Minutes story. It opened with Wallace seated in front of a large photo of the Osprey. “It’s been a bad week for the United States Marine Corps: allegations of deception about flaws in the aircraft you see behind me, the V-22 Osprey, an ungainly bird that the Corps insists it simply must have to help fight this nation’s battles in the 21st Century,” Wallace began. “We’ll hear from the families of Marines who died in two Osprey crashes in the past nine months, families disillusioned about what they see as the Corps’ cynical use of their husbands and sons, in effect, as test pilots on the flawed aircraft.” The first interview, however, was with former Osprey test pilot Grady Wilson, who had resigned from Boeing five months after the 1992 crash at Quantico. A year before that, Wilson had been lucky to walk away from the fifth Osprey prototype after it went out of control and crashed at Wilmington, Delaware, because its roll rate vyros were miswired. Wallace didn’t mention the miswiring, but he showed video of Wilson’s crash. Talking over it as Aircraft 5 wobbled drunkenly just above the tarmac, then flipped and ground its nose and left rotor into the runway with its engines whining, Wallace said that “ever since its initial test flights, like this one in 1991, the Osprey has been in trouble.” Wilson told Wallace the Osprey was “very complex,” and “a hybrid. It’s a crossbreed, if you will. It’s part helicopter, it’s part fixed-wing. As such, it will never be an excellent helicopter or an excellent fixed-wing.” The story went on to show file footage of Cheney when he was defense secretary telling Congress the Osprey was “a program I don’t need.” Next came Wallace in a confrontational interview with Representative Curt Weldon. As Weldon defended the Osprey, Wallace told him four of the first fifteen had crashed. “That’s 25 percent of all the Ospreys at a cost, so far, of $12 billion,” Wallace said. The story cited the Pentagon inspector general’s report the previous summer questioning whether the Osprey was ready for Full Rate Production and noted that the Navy Department had let it go into Operational Evaluation with twenty-two waivers of requirements. Wallace cited Pentagon test director Coyle’s conclusion that the Osprey was “not operationally suitable” because of its many maintenance issues. The interviews with family members of Osprey crash victims came next. One was with Connie Gruber. She said her husband “would be on the schedule to fly and come home early and say, ‘We couldn’t fly. Something was broken they had to fix. We need to get a part.’ Or on occasion, he would be flying, and they would encounter some type of caution, some type of warning, and they’d have to land early. And I’d say that—that was pretty much routine.”

  “You’ve said that your husband was doing a job that he was not supposed to be doing,” Wallace said.

  “It wasn’t his job to get the bugs out of this aircraft,” she said. “My husband was not a test pilot. The remaining pilots are also not test pilots. We feel that the aircraft is not ready. I think it’s shown that it’s unreliable, it’s unpredictable, it’s very high-maintenance, and the results have been catastrophic.”

  Later in the broadcast, Wallace noted that the Pentagon had been on the verge of approving Full Rate Production in December when Sweaney and Murphy crashed at New River. “Apparently, the pressure to improve the Osprey’s poor maintenance record led the Marine Corps to mislead the American public about the reliability of the aircraft,” Wallace said. “As we were reporting this story, we got a letter from a Marine mechanic in the Osprey unit in New River, North Carolina. He explained what had been going on inside the unit.” Corporal Cliff Carlson’s anonymous letter and audio of his tape of VMMT-204 commander Leberman telling mechanics to “lie” to improve the squadron’s readiness rate followed. Wallace ended his report by explaining how Leberman had flown to New York the night before the broadcast with his attorneys, planning to appear, but after a “lengthy discussion” with Wallace and others at 60 Minutes had changed his mind. Wallace read a statement from Leberman saying his comments on the tape had been taken out of context and “in no way compromised the safety of any Marines or the integrity of the Osprey program.”

  For the integrity of the Osprey program, for Bell and Boeing, and especially for the Marine Corps, the broadcast was catastrophic. Wallace had portrayed the Osprey as a boondoggle. Worse than that, he had portrayed it as a boondoggle the Marines had lied about.

  The night after the broadcast, Jones set out to defend the Corps, appearing on PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Jones was on after former Pentagon test director Coyle and James Furman, a lawyer Connie Gruber had hired to sue Bell and Boeing. Furman questioned the Osprey’s safety. Coyle questioned its reliability.

  The allegation of maintenance reporting fraud was “particularly disturbing in an organization like the United States Marine Corps, which prides itself on integrity and truthfulness,” Jones told host Ray Suarez. “There is no program I know of that would justify anyone to make false statements concerning the readiness of a program.” Over its history, Jones said, the Osprey had “survived the critics because of its enormous potential, a potential that really transcends, Ray, the military community and extends, in my judgment, into the commercial sector as well. When you think of the potential benefits to our industrial base by being able to market this kind of technology, it’s going to be, I think, a very big addition to reducing our crowded airways over our airports and the like. The military application, though, is beyond question: twice as fast, three times the payload, five times the range of any comparable helicopter.” Getting an aircraft like that “is exactly what we should do—but not simply because it’s a program that we have fallen in love with,” Jones said. The Marines would “take a measured look” at the Osprey once the Blue Ribbon Commission appointed by Cohen in December had finished its work, Jones promised.

  Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan administration Pentagon official and a longtime tiltrotor supporter, tried to help head off what he called “the emerging conventional wisdom” about the Osprey. Gaffney was now president of the Center for Security Policy, a conservative Washington think tank. The day after Jones’s appearance on PBS, Gaffney published a commentary in the Washington Times. Despite “the powerful 60 Minutes assault” on the program, he wrote, the Marines were right to want the Osprey. “Studies have shown that the V-22’s significantly longer range and speed may contribute decisively to success on the battlefield,” Gaffney argued. The tiltrotor could ease airport congestion in the United States and had huge potential as an ex
port product. He concluded by saying the Osprey “might more appropriately be named for another creature—the Phoenix. Like that mythical beast, the V-22 can— and must be allowed to—rise again.”

  Whether the Osprey was going to rise again seemed doubtful. Within days, the themes of the 60 Minutes broadcast were taken up by major newspapers around the country. The editorial in the New York Times calling for the Osprey to be canceled was followed by one in the Chicago Tribune saying the Osprey “should not fly again.” The Washington Post and other newspapers, especially those published near Marine Corps bases, assigned reporters to investigate the Osprey. The crashes, the flap over Wallace calling Carol Sweaney, Jones’s and McCorkle’s reactions to that, plus the investigation of VMMT-204, followed by the 60 Minutes story itself had created a perfect media storm.

  Soon the storm threatened to sink the Osprey. Two days after Jones appeared on PBS, the Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate Armed Services Committee sent Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld a letter saying the allegation that maintenance records at VMMT-204 had been falsified cast doubt on “the integrity of information” provided to Congress by the Marines. They asked Rumsfeld to shift the investigation to an independent agency. “This program will not be able to move forward unless and until the Defense Department has restored confidence in the integrity of the V-22 program and the people managing it,” the letter said. Just before the Senate committee released the letter, Jones issued a statement announcing that he had asked Rumsfeld to have the Pentagon inspector general take over the New River investigation. Jones said he had “complete confidence” in the Marine Corps inspector general, who had launched the investigation six days earlier, but “I am concerned that the nature and gravity of the allegations may invite unwarranted perceptions of command influence or institutional bias.”

  Four days after that, Vice President Dick Cheney was asked his opinion of the Osprey during an appearance on ABC’s Sunday talk show This Week. Cheney said he had tried to kill it for cost a decade earlier; the decision on whether to continue it now, however, would be made by Rumsfeld and Congress. At the same time, he added, “Given the track record and the loss of life so far, it would appear to me that there are very serious questions that can and should be and I hope will be raised about the Osprey.”

  Cheney’s nonendorsement was followed by an article in Aviation Week reporting that the Air Force Special Operations Command was “reconsidering its commitment” to the Osprey. The same week, the Washington Bureau of Knight Ridder Newspapers, a big chain that owned the Philadelphia Inquirer and other important papers, published a story describing how support for the Osprey was flagging. Donald Trump, once a member of the Tilt-Rotor Technology Coalition formed by Representative Curt Weldon and Bell-Boeing in the 1990s, had changed his mind. “I believe you should fly in a helicopter or an airplane, but not both,” Trump told Knight Ridder. “The Osprey has too many working parts to ever be a very safe plane.” Within days, articles examining other criticisms of the Osprey appeared in USA Today and other newspapers around the country. The media storm was raging. The conventional wisdom had been established. The Osprey was no longer just another big defense program that was behind schedule, over cost, and targeted primarily by critics who coveted its funding for their pet projects. It was no longer just a weird aircraft with a question mark over it because of crashes. The Osprey was a national scandal.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE DARK AGES

  Dick Spivey was horrified at what was happening to the Osprey. By the time of the New River crash, Spivey was working full-time marketing Bell Helicopter’s new Quad TiltRotor concept, the giant Osprey follow-on he’d helped conceive and gotten Commandant Jones interested in the year before. The Osprey was no longer Spivey’s responsibility, but he’d long believed it the key to his dream of a tiltrotor revolution. Spivey also still considered the Osprey his baby. He’d played a major role in selling the Marines on the Osprey. He’d helped nurse it through its near death at Dick Cheney’s hands. Despite its horrible accidents, Spivey was absolutely convinced the Osprey would be safe if maintained and flown correctly. More than that, he believed it would save lives in the future by helping the military win battles and by flying casualties to medical care faster than any helicopter could. Beyond that, he had spent three decades promoting the tiltrotor as a dream machine that would reshape aviation. Now that dream was under attack. He desperately wanted to defend it.

  In those early days of 2001, though, with twenty-three Marines dead in Osprey crashes over the past year and the scandal at VMMT-204 forcing the Marine Corps to defend not just the Osprey but its very integrity, Spivey and others at Bell and Boeing were keeping their heads down. There was no point in defending the Osprey too loudly until the New River crash investigation was over and the exact cause of the accident was known. There was no point in defending it too loudly until the Defense Department inspector general determined whether there was a link between the crashes at Marana and New River and the alleged falsification of maintenance records at VMMT-204. There was no point in defending the Osprey too much at all, really, until the Blue Ribbon Commission created by former Defense Secretary William Cohen issued its verdict on the program. The only good news was that President Bush and Vice President Cheney seemed content to leave the Osprey’s fate to the Defense Department.

  Spivey, like the Marine Corps and everyone else in the Osprey camp, was pinning his hopes on that commission, officially the “Panel to Review the V-22 Program.” Spivey had known its chairman, retired four-star general and former Assistant Commandant Jack Dailey, since the early 1980s, when Dailey was an aide to a general who visited Fort Worth to see the XV-15. Dailey later flew the XV-15 himself, and Spivey considered him a friend. Spivey was also acquainted with another commission member, Norman R. Augustine, a big name in the defense industry. Augustine, sixty-five at the time, was a Princeton-educated aeronautical engineer who in the 1970s had held top civilian jobs in the Army Department, including acting secretary. Later in his career, he had run two big defense companies, Martin Marietta and Lockheed Martin. He also had published a popular book on business practices, Augustine’s Laws, which included pithy maxims such as “It costs a lot to build bad products.” Augustine’s book famously predicted that, the way aviation industry costs were rising, “In the year 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase just one aircraft,” which the Air Force, Navy, and Marines would have to share. Spivey didn’t know the other two commission members, retired Air Force General James B. Davis and MIT aeronautics professor Eugene Covert, but clearly they weren’t bomb throwers. Spivey was sure the Osprey would get a fair trial from a panel like that, just as surely as critics would dismiss its findings as a product of the military-industrial complex.

  Commission chairman Dailey had worried about that from the moment Deputy Defense Secretary Rudy deLeon called and asked him to chair the panel. “Wouldn’t I be seen as not objective?” Dailey had asked. Not only was Dailey a former assistant commandant, he had been a believer in the tiltrotor and the Osprey for years, at least since he’d met Dick Spivey in Fort Worth and seen the XV-15. “The commandant wants you to do this,” deLeon had said, so Dailey went to see Jones. As Dailey recalled their conversation years later, he told Jones: “If you’re looking for this to come out in favor of the Osprey, I’m not the right guy. I’m going to tell you the truth, whatever is it.”

  “That’s what we want,” Jones said. “That’s why I want you to do it. I don’t want to buy these things if we’re going to kill Marines in them.”

  The commission, like the inspector general and the crash investigators, would need months to complete its work. Until the investigations were done, no Ospreys were going to fly, and no arguments in favor of the Osprey were going to fly, either. The whole program was in limbo. In the meantime, the Osprey was already being condemned in the court of public opinion. The media had begun routinely referring to it as “the troubled Osprey,” as if “troubled” were pa
rt of its name, and by 2001, trials in the court of public opinion were being conducted in a new venue: the Internet. Spivey learned that the hard way.

  One day in February 2001, someone at Bell Helicopter directed Spivey’s attention to a website called G2mil.com, where he found a long article on the Osprey titled “The V-22 Fiasco.” The text made Spivey’s blood boil even more than the title. It was written by G2mil.com’s creator, Carlton W. Meyer, who had served three years in the Marines as a combat engineer before deciding to become a military writer. Meyer, thirty-nine at the time, had created G2mil.com while managing his wife’s dental practice in El Cerrito, California. His article declared that the Osprey “will soon become the largest fiasco in Marine Corps history unless changes are made. The V-22 can fill a role as a long-range transport, it cannot fill the assault helicopter role. The fundamental truth is: The V-22 is too expensive and too unstable for combat assaults, and requires modifications and at least two more years of development for non-combat roles. The V-22 can fly safely if it slowly comes to a hover over a landing zone, then carefully sets down. Obviously, this is not a good tactic in a combat zone, especially for something as large as a V-22. The V-22 can swoop down like an assault helicopter, but this is a risky maneuver. If the pilot does not perform the task flawlessly, the V-22 loses lift, flips over, and everyone dies.” This was an allusion to vortex ring state, the phenomenon blamed for the Marana crash, in which a rotor that descends too quickly into its own downwash no longer creates thrust properly.

  Meyer’s article went on to say that the Marines had demonstrated “a lack of moral turpitude [sic] by claiming the V-22 costs $40 million each.” Each Osprey would cost $76 million, Meyer contended. Citing Pentagon test director Philip Coyle’s finding that the Osprey was “not operationally suitable” because of maintenance problems, Meyer called the existing Ospreys “hangar queens.” Meyer said Sikorsky’s UH-60L Black Hawk was a “better assault aircraft.” Then he got nasty. “The Marines in charge know the current V-22 is unsafe, but they plan to continue production until more crashes finally end the program,” Meyer wrote.