The Dream Machine

by Richard Whittle

  In the early 1980s, while he was at Martin Marietta, Dunn had written a paper on his arguments against the Osprey and given it to congressional aides, hoping to persuade key lawmakers that building the tiltrotor was a mistake. He’d failed. He hadn’t paid a lot of attention to the Osprey in the years since, but when he read in November 2000 that Pentagon test director Phil Coyle had declared the Osprey “not operationally suitable” for fielding, Dunn sent Coyle a long e-mail on the subject. Dunn told Coyle the Osprey should be called the “Albatross” because it would never be safe or affordable. “If I can be of any assistance,” he offered, “please don’t hesitate to call me.” Coyle sent Dunn a copy of his November 17, 2000, report on the Osprey’s Operational Evaluation and thanked him for his interest.

  Back when Dunn worked for Martin Marietta, he had known Representative John Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat and Marine Corps veteran who chaired the powerful Defense Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee. The day after the December 11, 2000, New River crash, Dunn sent Murtha an e-mail urging him to stop the Osprey. Dunn got no reply.

  After the Blue Ribbon Commission issued its report the following spring, Dunn tried unsuccessfully to reach panel member Augustine by phone at his office and home, then e-mailed him a new set of arguments. “For your own integrity, you might want to consider finding a way to dis-associate [sic] yourself from what appears to be full support of the V-22 concept,” Dunn wrote. Augustine, who had taken Dunn’s criticisms of the Osprey into account previously but decided he was wrong, e-mailed back a couple of weeks later. He told Dunn the commission no longer existed and gave him the name and number of a Defense Department official to contact “if you have further inputs.”

  Next Dunn turned to a society of his fellow former HH-3 helicopter pilots, the Jolly Green Association, e-mailing its members and asking them to help him stop the Osprey. A few were interested and began trading information and opinions with him. Dunn was encouraged by that. Then he learned that the new Bush administration’s undersecretary of defense for acquisition, its top weapons buyer, was going to be Edward C. “Pete” Aldridge. Dunn had known Aldridge for years.

  Aldridge, a Texas-born aeronautical engineer, had been secretary of the Air Force and held other influential jobs in the Pentagon and the defense industry since the 1960s. Dunn had known him in the 1980s, when Dunn was promoting missile programs for Martin Marietta and Aldridge was undersecretary of the Air Force and in charge of its space programs. Even before Aldridge was sworn in to his new job as under-secretary of defense in May 2001, Dunn sent him some of his arguments against the Osprey. The day Aldridge took his oath of office, Dunn e-mailed him that he had “indisputable evidence” the Osprey should be canceled. He asked Aldridge to call him. Aldridge never did. Three days later, Dunn e-mailed Aldridge a report he’d written on the Osprey saying its rotors were “a major design flaw and safety issue.” Dunn also sent the paper to other Pentagon officials and the General Accounting Office, the congressional auditing agency. Dunn told its recipients the report had been written by a group of veteran combat helicopter pilots, test pilots, and rotorcraft engineers.

  Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had told Aldridge the Osprey would be his to handle, and at first, Aldridge was inclined to kill it. The Osprey’s speed compared to helicopters was a clear advantage, but Aldridge wasn’t sure it was worth the extra money. When he added in the question of whether its side-by-side rotors made it more vulnerable than a helicopter to vortex ring state, the potential problems created by its powerful downwash, the Osprey’s “very, very bad” maintenance record, the question of whether it would be agile enough in combat, plus what it would cost to fix all of its problems, its value seemed “marginal,” Aldridge told me years later. “I was on the verge of canceling it,” he said. The Marines, though, “desperately wanted the airplane,” Aldridge said, and the only fair and logical way to decide whether they should have it was to fix it and then put it through the rigorous flight-testing that should have been done in the first place.

  Aldridge thought some of Harry Dunn’s arguments about the Osprey made sense, but he wasn’t about to get into a dialogue with Dunn about it. Aldridge remembered Dunn mainly as the guy who had arranged meetings between Aldridge and Norm Augustine in the 1980s, when Aldridge was undersecretary of the Air Force and Augustine was a Martin Marietta executive. In June 2001, Aldridge sent Dunn an e-mail saying he had read all of his messages but hinting that there was no need to send more. “I have an action underway that will result in a decision on whether to proceed on this program or not. But it must be done in my way,” Aldridge wrote. Aldridge said he had talked about the Osprey with the secretary of the Navy, Gordon England, “and he fully understands the situation. We will make a decision together. Regards, Pete.”

  A few days earlier, Aldridge had told the Navy Department to put together a plan to implement the Blue Ribbon Commission’s recommendations. He told the Navy that, for now, it could ask Congress to provide enough money to continue building Ospreys at the lowest rate possible to keep the Bell-Boeing production lines open. He also rescinded the authority his predecessor had given the Navy to decide whether the Osprey could go into Full Rate Production. Aldridge personally would make that decision.

  * * *

  That spring, newspapers and magazines around the country published numerous articles on the Osprey. They examined the crashes, the Osprey’s long and expensive history, the politics that had kept it alive. Some questioned whether the Marines needed such an expensive aircraft. Many questioned the Osprey’s safety. Once the Blue Ribbon Commission issued its report, Representative Curt Weldon decided it was time to try to burnish the Osprey’s increasingly tarnished image.

  On May 9, Republican Weldon announced that he and Democratic representative James Oberstar of Minnesota, who as chairman of the House Aviation Subcommittee had arranged for the XV-15 to land at the Capitol in 1990, were reviving the Tilt-Rotor Technology Coalition. The alliance of congressional and business advocates had helped lobby Congress to reject Dick Cheney’s attempts to kill the Osprey a decade earlier but fallen dormant in the intervening years. Weldon also announced that, as chairman of the Procurement Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, he would hold a hearing on the Osprey at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard on May 21. “The problem we’ve had is because of negative publicity,” he told the Philadelphia Inquirer. The Osprey had been damaged politically by “grandstanding done by the national media outlets,” he said. Most members of Congress “don’t pay attention to defense issues,” he explained, “so they see headlines on accidents and think this program has a serious problem.”

  The media coverage was demoralizing many of those working on the Osprey. Even after the Blue Ribbon Commission urged the Pentagon and Congress to give the Osprey another chance, many engineers and test pilots on the project for Navair were still wondering whether it wasn’t just a matter of time before the plug was pulled. Even if the Osprey survived, clearly it was going to be a long time before it flew again. More than a few looked for new jobs, or new assignments within Navair or their companies. Some left the Osprey behind that year.

  Once the Blue Ribbon Commission issued its report, Spivey and other managers and executives at Bell and Boeing became less worried about media coverage than they were about whether Aldridge would go along with the commission’s recommendations. This was why Spivey was alarmed when he heard from one of his contacts that Harry Dunn was sending e-mails knocking the Osprey to government officials. Spivey was afraid they might listen to someone like Dunn, whose e-mails to others often said he was speaking for a group of pilots and engineers who called themselves the “Red Ribbon Panel.”

  Spivey had known Dunn for years, ever since Dunn was in the Air Force and Spivey was a young Bell Helicopter marketer. They’d seen each other often at aviation trade shows after Dunn joined Martin Marietta, even gone out for dinner or drinks about once a year. Spivey had talked to Dunn a lot about the tiltrotor i
n those days, and he’d thought him intrigued by its potential for Air Force special operations. Now Spivey wanted to find out who Dunn was talking to and what he was telling them. On June 7, Spivey e-mailed his old friend:

  Harry,

  A voice from the past. Had lost touch with where you were. I understand that you have written several things about the V-22 lately. Would you be so kind as to share them with me. I would greatly appreciate it.

  Thanks,

  Dick

  Dunn was wary in his reply. “Ah Ha!!” he began. “I was beginning to wonder when you would surface.” Dunn told Spivey he had been alerted by a friend “that some of our work was being passed on to you all.” Dunn and his “little band of 40 to 50” pilots and engineers were digging up a lot of information on the Osprey and had done a lot of analysis, he said. “None of it would be new to you however, so I don’t see any real purpose of going abck [sic] and sending you some of our work.” Instead, Dunn suggested, maybe Spivey could send him some details on a non-stop flight an Osprey had made the previous year from California to Maryland with aerial refueling. “Great chatting with you—let’s keep in touch!” he closed.

  The two old friends circled each other again like wrestlers two weeks later, when Dunn sent Spivey a message asking if he was going to send any information and whether Spivey had known George Troutman very well.

  Spivey replied without a salutation:

  Knew George very well. Would be glad to respond, but I have seen nothing of your work yet. Just that it exists . . .

  Thanks,

  Dick

  Four days later, Dunn discovered Spivey’s angry reply to Carlton Meyer’s article on the G2mil.com website. Dunn copied it and e-mailed it to Spivey with a message that began, “My Dear Dick Spivey—My My—such tantrums!—trash???” Dunn told Spivey he should “get in a closed room with a couple of honest rotorcraft engineers for a review of what the red ribbon guys and others have discovered.”

  Spivey didn’t reply, though he really wished he could find out what Dunn was saying about the Osprey, and whether any decision makers were listening. He also really wished he hadn’t replied to that article on G2mil.com.

  * * *

  One thing was clear to everyone in the Osprey camp: this time they had to get it right. The Marine Corps, Navair, Bell-Boeing, and their allies all knew they had taken two swings at the ball already and missed both times. Pete Aldridge was giving them a third chance. They didn’t want to blow it.

  There were a lot of reasons things had gone so wrong over the years. The overly ambitious requirements of the original JVX program, the companies’ blithe assurances on schedules and lowballing of bids, the attempt to cram so many new technologies into a new kind of aircraft, the 50–50 Bell-Boeing partnership and their culture clash, the design compromises dictated by the need to fly from amphibious assault ships, former Navy Secretary John Lehman’s insistence on a fixed-price development contract, funding shortfalls during Cheney’s attempt to cancel the Osprey, the push by the Marines to get the Osprey into service as fast as possible afterward—everyone had his list, and there was plenty of blame to go around. Most agreed, though, that the biggest mistake had been allowing time—schedules—to drive the program. Politically it would be difficult, but the Marine Corps leadership, those in charge at Navair, Bell and Boeing executives, and most everyone else involved all agreed that from now on, the Osprey had to be “event-driven,” not “schedule-driven.” Soon “event-driven” became the program’s unofficial mantra, repeated in nearly every meeting, every congressional hearing, and every media interview. This time, they were going to do it right instead of in a hurry.

  Navair’s first step was to ask NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, where research on the tiltrotor had begun more than thirty years earlier, to study two questions about the Osprey that the Blue Ribbon Commission said needed more work: vortex ring state and autorotation. The director of the Ames center, Dr. Henry McDonald, decided to chair the committee himself and recruited eleven other experts to do the study. They were mostly Ph.D.s and “graybeards” who had made their careers in rotorcraft research, but the panel also included a couple of test pilots, one of whom had directed the Osprey flight test team at Navair. McDonald also recruited twenty-seven other experts to advise the committee. Twelve were from NASA Ames but most of the rest, who included five test pilots, had worked on or had some connection to the Osprey. When McDonald invited Bell to send three of its best tiltrotor experts, the company sent two of its most senior engineers and Dick Spivey.

  Serving as an adviser to the NASA committee was how Spivey learned that Harry Dunn wasn’t the only one with credentials and contacts who thought the Osprey flawed, a discovery that triggered something in Spivey akin to parental protective instinct.

  When the committee met in June 2001 to hear briefings by invited experts, one was Arthur “Rex” Rivolo of the Institute for Defense Analyses, one of a handful of federally funded think tanks paid to do independent research for the Pentagon. IDA had long been under contract to monitor the Osprey for the Pentagon’s Office of Operational Test and Evaluation. Rivolo had been doing that work for IDA since the early 1990s, when he joined the think tank after an extraordinary early career.

  Rivolo’s dark hair and olive skin suggested his Italian birth, but his accent was all New York. His parents had moved from Genoa, Italy, to Queens, New York, in 1955, eleven years after he was born. Bitten by the aviation bug as a child, Rivolo earned a degree in aerospace engineering at Brooklyn Polytechnic University, then became an Air Force fighter pilot. He flew combat missions in F-4 Phantom jets in Vietnam, then came home and earned a Ph.D. in physics from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, on Long Island. To keep flying, he joined the Air National Guard on Long Island, where he switched to helicopters because the nearest unit with jets was too long a commute. Rivolo joined IDA in 1992 after six years of teaching astrophysics at the University of Pennsylvania and a failed attempt at an aviation-related business venture.

  Rivolo spent a lot of time with the Multiservice Operational Test Team in the late 1990s. He even flew the Osprey with MOTT commander Lieutenant Colonel Keith Sweaney and others. As a pilot, Rivolo loved the Osprey. He thought its ability to take off and land like a helicopter and fly like an airplane was “sexy,” and he believed the tiltrotor would be great for civilian air transport. Over time, though, Rivolo concluded that the Osprey was the wrong aircraft to fly troops into a landing zone under fire.

  Rivolo saw two major flaws in the Osprey as a combat aircraft. First, like Harry Dunn, Rivolo was sure the Osprey couldn’t autorotate to the ground safely if its engines were shot out or failed for any reason. Secondly, after the April 2000 crash at Marana, Rivolo became convinced the Osprey’s side-by-side rotors made it unacceptably vulnerable to vortex ring state, the risk of a rotor failing to produce thrust as it should if it gets into its own downwash too quickly. By 2001, when he testified to the NASA committee, Rivolo also felt Navair officials had misled him in the past about how thoroughly the Osprey was being flight-tested. After that, he became one of the Osprey’s most determined internal critics.

  Like a lot of helicopter pilots, Rivolo thought the ability to autoro-tate was a vital safety feature for a rotorcraft going into combat. The U.S. armed forces lost thousands of helicopters during the Vietnam War, but Rivolo believed autorotation had saved many as well. The ability to auto-rotate had always been expected of helicopters, but from the time the Osprey was still called the JVX, whether the helicopter-airplane hybrid was required to be able to autorotate to a landing had been open to interpretation. The original Joint Services Operational Requirement for the JVX had said: “In the event that all engine power is lost while in flight, the aircraft must be capable of a power-off glide/autorotation to a survivable emergency landing.” Unlike a helicopter, the tiltrotor had a wing and could fly like an airplane, so in theory, if an Osprey lost both engines, it might glide to a safe landing with
its rotors pointed forward rather than autorotate to the ground with the rotors pointed up. The Osprey’s rotors were too long to land like an airplane without them striking the ground, but if they hit anything, they were designed to “broomstraw”—shred into small pieces rather than large chunks that might fly into the aircraft. In 1995, as Navair and the Marines were preparing to ask a high-level Pentagon committee to approve Low Rate Initial Production, the implied requirement that the Osprey be able to autorotate was watered down even more. After that, the requirement simply said: “Power Off Glide/Auto-Rotation. The [Osprey] must be capable of a survivable emergency landing.”

  No matter what the official requirement said, Rivolo thought the Osprey needed to be able to autorotate to a landing like a helicopter, and in the late 1990s he checked with Navair to make sure autorotation landings were going to be done in flight tests. “I was told ‘testing is progressing; it’s going slower than expected, but it’s progressing and everything is fine,’” Rivolo recalled. “That was an out-and-out lie.”