Spivey was beside himself when he read the article, especially Meyer’s argument that Sikorsky’s Black Hawk would be a better troop transport for the Marines. That was the argument Pentagon budget analyst David Chu had made a decade earlier. It was the argument Sikorsky lobbyists had been making since the Osprey program began in 1982. Sikorsky had been Bell’s chief competitor ever since Igor Sikorsky and Bell’s Arthur Young had developed the companies’ first helicopters in the 1930s. The Osprey camp often suspected critics of being on Sikorsky’s payroll, though no one had ever proven such a thing. Spivey fired off a seething, insulting response to Meyer. To Spivey’s horror, Meyer quickly posted it on his website:
V-22 Article was Trash
You must be a Sikorsky employee or a United Technologies stockholder. There are more mistakes and misrepresentations in this trash than I have seen in my 26 years with the Osprey program. You clearly don’t know what you are talking about. Good candidate for the Darwin Award.
Dick Spivey
Spivey felt like a fool right after he hit the “send” button. When he saw his e-mail posted on Meyer’s website, along with an invitation to point out the mistakes Spivey saw in the article, he felt even worse. Spivey knew he’d been dumb to lash out, but he was seeing red at the time. He wasn’t going to make matters worse now by responding to Meyer’s challenge. Meyer clearly had his mind made up. Besides, Spivey was already afraid some Bell executive would see the exchange and be as embarrassed by it as he was. Spivey resolved never to do such a stupid thing again.
* * *
The 60 Minutes broadcast and the wave of stories about the “troubled Osprey” in the traditional press worried everyone at Bell and Boeing, but the fact that the Marines’ integrity was being questioned because of the maintenance scandal was what worried Spivey most. Spivey knew Bell and Boeing would do everything they could to save the Osprey, and they had formidable resources. Bell and Boeing employed skilled lobbyists, and there were thousands of Osprey subcontractors around the country, giving many members of Congress a stake in it. Through their political action committees and other donations, the companies and their executives and employees made hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions each year to make sure lawmakers listened to their arguments. All that had helped in the past and would help in the future. The key, though, always had been the Marines’ determination to have the Osprey, plus the Corps’ high standing in the eyes of the public and Congress. The Marines had kept Cheney from killing the Osprey. The Marines had defended it in budget battles in the Pentagon and on the Hill. Now the Marines were under a cloud. The Osprey team’s best player was on the disabled list.
General Jones and some of the Osprey’s supporters in Congress, meanwhile, were wondering if Bell and Boeing had simply delivered a lemon, a shoddy aircraft. The Iron Triangle—the natural coalition of industry, the military, and politicians that had spawned the Osprey and shielded it for two decades—was in disarray. Even the Osprey’s greatest supporter in Congress, Representative Curt Weldon, was distancing himself from the companies. In a February 1 conference call with reporters, Weldon said he still believed in the Osprey and still believed the Marines needed it. Word that a hydraulic leak had provoked the crash at New River, though, angered him, he said. “Boeing and Bell Helicopter Textron have to get their quality-control act together,” Weldon declared. “We will hold them accountable. We will not continue with these types of incidents that should have been straightened out in the manufacturing process.”
* * *
The New River crash investigation findings made it clear there was a lot to straighten out.
Major Navy and Marine Corps aircraft accidents are investigated separately and independently by two groups of investigators, an Aircraft Mishap Board and a Judge Advocate General Manual team, both composed of serving military officers. Aircraft Mishap Board investigation results are largely privileged, released only in redacted form. Witnesses and companies are given confidentiality so they can provide information that might improve safety without fear of legal liability. A Judge Advocate General Manual investigation, known as a JAGMAN report and pronounced the way it looks, describes an accident in detail, assesses responsibility, and makes recommendations. The JAGMAN report on the New River crash was completed in February and released in April 2001. It and the Aircraft Mishap Board report made clear that Boeing, Bell, and their overseers at the Naval Air Systems Command had made serious mistakes with the Osprey.
The investigations found that, as so often in such disasters, a complex series of events led Lieutenant Colonel Keith Sweaney and Major Michael Murphy to lose control of their Osprey. The root causes, though, were painfully simple. Bell had fallen short in designing the layout of the brittle titanium hydraulic lines and thick wire bundles that snaked around inside the Osprey’s jam-packed nacelles. Boeing had failed to test the Osprey’s flight control software adequately. Navair had failed to catch their mistakes.
Even more painful was another finding: Sweaney and Murphy might have been able to land their Osprey safely despite the hydraulic leak and the software error if they had pushed the Primary Flight Control System reset button only once or twice instead of eight or nine times. Pushing the button was what they were trained to do when cautions of the sort they saw on their cockpit display posted, but no one ever anticipated pilots pushing it repeatedly. Investigators were unable to determine whether both or only one of the pilots pushed the button. Nor could they tell whether it was pushed so many times on purpose or hit accidentally as Crossbow 08 bucked in the air and the pilots tried to brace themselves. Pushing it so much, though, threw the Osprey out of control by lowering and raising the pitch of its rotor blades over and over again with a hydraulic leak that restored the blade pitch at different rates on each rotor.
The investigations found that the hydraulic line that ruptured in Crossbow 08, one of ten such titanium tubes in each nacelle, sprang a leak because a bundle of wires had been chafing it. The wire bundle was supposed to be installed with slack so the wires could flex as the nacelle tilted up or forward, but the worker who installed this bundle left more slack than the blueprint called for, the investigators concluded. VMMT-204 mechanics couldn’t detect the chafing during routine inspections because the lines were in a part of the nacelle that couldn’t be seen without removing the entire outer skin.
Such chafing wasn’t unique to Crossbow 08, the investigators found, and Navair had been aware of the problem for years. Mechanics had often found wire bundles chafing hydraulic lines. Navair had issued a bulletin even before the first Osprey came into the fleet directing mechanics to wrap Teflon around the lines to prevent chafing at thirty-one locations where they were held by clamps. Coyle, the Pentagon test director, had cited hydraulic failures as an item deserving “special mention” when he found the Osprey “not operationally suitable” a month before the New River crash. Despite all that, Navair never had addressed the problem in a comprehensive way. Inspections of VMMT-204’s Ospreys after the crash found eight instances of hydraulic line chafing on seven aircraft.
The investigators concluded that the ultimate cause of the crash, however, was the way the flight control software reduced and then restored the pitch on Crossbow 08’s rotor blades when Sweaney and Murphy pushed the Primary Flight Control System reset button. Pressing the reset button was standard operating procedure when faults such as hyd ? fail posted on the Osprey’s cockpit display. All that was supposed to do was clear the fault so the pilots could see whether it was real or just a nuisance, a computer error. Normally, the fault either would disappear, proving it was a computer glitch, or post again, indicating a genuine problem. When Murphy and Sweaney hit the button, however, the flight control software went through a series of steps that removed and then restored the pitch on the rotor blades. No one knew the software would do that.
Boeing had designed the flight control software years earlier and tested it in an unusual facility at Ridley Park called the Flight Con
trol System Integrated Rig, known informally as the “Triple Lab.” The lab was a Plexiglas-enclosed room roughly the size of a handball court. Inside, working parts of the Osprey’s flight control machinery—the hydraulic actuators that move the aircraft’s swashplates, rudders, ailerons, and other mechanisms—were installed in Plexiglas boxes of their own. Running between the boxes were wire bundles and titanium hydraulic lines the same size and in roughly the same layout as inside an Osprey. Just outside the lab was a series of computers that were loaded with the flight control software and connected to a mock cockpit with the Osprey’s controls. This “in-the-loop” lab was how Boeing tested whether the software and machinery worked together as they should.
In the fall and winter of 1996, Boeing engineers ran fifteen tests in the Triple Lab of how an Osprey would handle if it suffered a hydraulic leak, simulating leaks by cutting off hydraulic pumps. They never tested what would happen with simultaneous leaks in Systems One and Three— Crossbow 08’s problem—because an actuator in the lab failed. Nor did they test what would happen if the PFCS reset button was pushed when a hydraulic leak occurred in flight.
* * *
By the time the JAGMAN report was released, the Blue Ribbon Commission had issued its own findings. The four-member panel, backed by a three-member professional staff consisting of a Marine Corps colonel, an Air Force colonel, and a former Marine Corps officer who had been a test pilot and an astronaut, examined the Osprey program from top to bottom. The panel members heard briefings and took testimony from officials in the Marine Corps aviation branch and Navair, from top officials down to Marine and company Osprey pilots. They flew the Osprey in a computerized simulator. They visited the Bell and Boeing factories, examined how key parts of the aircraft were built, interviewed executives, managers, engineers, and factory floor supervisors. They went to VMMT-204 at New River and had mechanics show them how hard it was to inspect and work on the Osprey’s nacelles and to use its electronic maintenance manual, which the mechanics said was riddled with errors. Back in Washington, Pentagon test director Coyle briefed them on the maintenance issues that led him to find the Osprey “not operationally suitable.” They interviewed a General Accounting Office investigator about her agency’s concerns with the Osprey.
In March, they held a public hearing at a hotel in Crystal City, just over the Potomac River from Washington. The witnesses included Osprey supporters and critics, as well as Connie Gruber and Trish Brow, whose husbands had piloted the Osprey that crashed at Marana. Relatives of others who died in the accident, and their attorneys in lawsuits they had filed against Bell and Boeing, also testified. The widows and their attorneys didn’t ask that the Osprey be canceled. They said they only wanted it made safe so other Marines wouldn’t die in it. “This was an accident that could have been avoided if only Bell-Boeing had presented the Marine Corps with a safe aircraft,” Connie Gruber told the commission.
The widows, some holding photos of their lost Marines in their laps, were seated in the front row of an audience of 150 or more on April 18, when the commission met in open session at the same Crystal City hotel to deliberate on its findings. The commission had found a lot of things wrong with the Osprey. The nacelles were “extremely poorly engineered,” panel member Norm Augustine told me years later. “The pathways for the hydraulic lines inside the nacelles and the fuel lines were extraordinarily complex,” he said. “The nacelle was just absolutely packed with many parts that were prone to need to be replaced not easily reachable from the outside. Just Engineering 101 failings.” There had been far too little flight-testing before Marines were allowed to ride in the back, and despite the billions spent, the Osprey had been “funded on a shoestring,” Augustine said, creating parts shortages that helped explain its poor maintenance and reliability record. As Augustine saw it, the easiest thing for the commission to do would be to recommend scrapping the Osprey. “The scuttlebutt was that the leadership of the Pentagon was very opposed to the program and wanted to cancel it,” Augustine recalled. Instead, the panel said the Pentagon should fix it.
There was “no evidence that the V-22 concept is fundamentally flawed,” the commission said in its report, and no other available aircraft would do the things for the Marine Corps and the Air Force Special Operations Command a tiltrotor could do. “As an example, the Desert One mission involved 2 days of hiding in the desert . . . a mission that could have been carried out by a V-22-like aircraft in a single period of darkness,” the report said. After eighteen years of development and nearly $12 billion spent on it, however, the panel said the Osprey was still far from ready. The commission made seventy-one recommendations in all. It said the Osprey’s nacelles should be redesigned to prevent hydraulic lines from chafing and to add access panels so mechanics could see and work in the nacelles more easily. It said the flight control software should be revised and thoroughly retested. The panel said the program should finish a series of flight tests begun after the Marana accident to determine how susceptible the Osprey was to vortex ring state. All Ospreys had been grounded after the New River crash, so the tests had been halted. The commission also said the Pentagon should reassess whether the Osprey should be required to be able to make an emergency landing the way a helicopter would, using a method called “autorotation.” The panel emphasized that Navair needed to improve the way it, Bell, and Boeing worked together.
While the changes were being made, the commission said, the government should keep buying a few Ospreys each year to keep production lines open. Those and existing Ospreys could be modified with the prescribed design changes later. Until the changes were made, the panel warned, pushing the Osprey into service would “further discredit the basic concept of the tiltrotor” and risk more crashes.
“This aircraft can do the job and it can be made to work,” Dailey said as the panel deliberated on its recommendations in the open session that April.
The Osprey camp was relieved, if not elated, by the commission’s conclusions. The recommendations were just a reprieve, not a pardon, but the panel had found no fundamental flaw in the tiltrotor. If the Pentagon and Congress went along, the Osprey would live and Bell-Boeing would get another chance—a second mulligan.
The Osprey’s critics were unimpressed. The Council for a Livable World think tank declared again that “the Osprey should be killed.” Carlton Meyer began writing another Osprey article for his website. In it, he called the commission a “bogus review panel.”
* * *
When Harry P. Dunn saw what the Blue Ribbon Commission had done, he was appalled. Dunn was seventy years old, a former career Air Force helicopter pilot who had spent fourteen years as director of congressional relations for Martin Marietta Corporation. Dunn was also just as sure the Osprey was a death trap as his old friend Dick Spivey was that the tiltrotor was the dream machine. By the spring of 2001, Dunn had been trying for months to get key people in government to see the Osprey as he did. Most recently, he had been e-mailing arguments against it to Blue Ribbon Commission member Augustine, Dunn’s boss years earlier at Martin Marietta. Augustine read all of Dunn’s e-mails and passed them on to the commission staff. He thought Dunn had some valid criticisms of the Osprey, such as his argument that its powerful rotor downwash would kick up a pilot-blinding “brownout” of dust and dirt in a desert landing zone. Augustine didn’t share Dunn’s view that the tiltrotor was inherently flawed and unsafe, however, and the commission clearly had rejected Dunn’s advice, too. Dunn, however, as he liked to say himself, was a “bullheaded Irishman.” He was determined to kill the Osprey, and the Blue Ribbon Commission’s conclusions weren’t going to stop him.
Dunn had credentials to go with his passion against the Osprey. An Iowa native, he had graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1954 but joined the Air Force because at the time he could become a pilot more quickly in that service than in the Navy or Marine Corps. During his twenty-three-year Air Force career, Dunn flew all kinds of planes and helicopters and earned a master’s
degree in aeronautical engineering at the University of Colorado. In the early 1960s, he was flight test director for the HH-3, an upgraded version of a Sikorsky helicopter nicknamed the “Jolly Green Giant,” which was used during the Vietnam War to rescue downed pilots. Dunn spent the last six years of his Air Force career as a legislative liaison officer in Washington, where he learned how the political game in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill was played. After retiring from the Air Force in 1977, he went to work for Martin Marietta as the company’s top staff lobbyist, though Dunn didn’t like to think of himself that way. He retired from Martin Marietta in 1991, then moved to Florida and spent nine years doing genealogical research on his Irish roots. Dunn still kept track of what was going on in the aviation world, though, and when the Osprey crashed at Marana in April 2000, killing nineteen Marines, Dunn felt like a prophet. He had seen the XV-15 fly at the 1981 Paris Air Show, which he attended as Senator Barry Goldwater’s legislative liaison escort. Dunn told me that after watching the XV-15, he told Goldwater and George Troutman, the Bell Helicopter lobbyist and one of Goldwater’s great friends, that the tiltrotor was “an accident waiting to happen.” Troutman never forgave him, Dunn said. Goldwater, however, later flew the XV-15 and became one of the Osprey’s important advocates.
Dunn was sure the tiltrotor’s side-by-side rotors and their wingtip placement made it unstable, apt to roll out of control if one rotor’s thrust got out of balance with the other. He saw dozens of flaws in the Osprey, but the most important boiled down to the size and shape of its rotors. The Osprey’s rotors had been sized to fit on an amphibious assault ship. Dunn was sure that made them too small to work well in helicopter flight. They also had far more twist than a helicopter rotor so they could function as propellers in airplane flight. Dunn was sure that meant the Osprey’s rotor blades would stall—stop producing thrust—along at least part of their length if a pilot tried the kind of “yank and bank” maneuvers helicopter pilots did in the Vietnam War. The undersized rotors also meant the Osprey had high disk loading, the pounds-per-square-foot measurement of how much thrust a rotor needs to lift its machine at normal flying weight. At more than twenty pounds per square foot of rotor disk, the Osprey’s disk loading was two to four times that of most military helicopters. This was why its rotor downwash was so strong. Dunn was sure the pronounced twist of its rotors, their light weight, and its high disk loading meant the Osprey would never be able to “autorotate” to a safe landing if it lost power in both engines, something helicopters always had been expected to do. In autorotation, a rotor’s size and shape allow it to spin fast enough even unpowered to produce the lift a helicopter needs to descend to the ground under control—like a maple seed, in the classic example.
The Dream Machine Page 42