The Dream Machine

by Richard Whittle

  * * *

  There were mornings that year when Major Paul Rock barely could summon the will to get out of bed and go to work at VMMT-204, the Osprey training squadron at New River. Rock loved the Marine Corps, he loved to fly, and he loved flying the Osprey. Now the Osprey was grounded and VMMT-204 was a miserable place to be. The crashes in 2000 had been devastating enough. Then had come the 60 Minutes broadcast with its tape of VMMT-204’s commander at the time, Lieutenant Colonel Fred Leberman, telling his Marines to “lie.” Rock hadn’t been in the meeting where Leberman said that, and when he heard it on television, he was stunned. Rock had never imagined he would hear such a thing coming from a Marine officer’s mouth. Like the rest of the squadron, Rock was also demoralized by what followed.

  The Marine Corps inspector general’s investigators had swooped down on VMMT-204 that January 18, the day Leberman was relieved of command, like a SWAT team. They’d seized computers and set out to interview all of the nearly 250 Marines in the squadron. The same day, Colonel Richard Dunnivan, who had “hot seated” with Lieutenant Colonel Keith Sweaney before the crash of Crossbow 08, took command of the squadron. Just over a week later, the Defense Department inspector general took over the investigation of VMMT-204. The investigators stayed for weeks, their investigation lasted for months, and it threw the squadron into chaos. Every morning, they posted a list of twenty to thirty enlisted Marines required to report for interviews. Officers were called personally to report for theirs. Other pilots and maintainers were left standing around with little to do, except ask over and over whether the Osprey was going to be canceled. Morale plummeted.

  The inspector general’s report concluded that the squadron had filed some false maintenance reports, but only during a two-week period after Leberman held his December 29 meeting with maintainers. During those two weeks, VMMT-204 reported its readiness rate as 100 percent every day. The sudden improvement was clearly preposterous. The investigation found no connection between false maintenance reports and the Osprey crashes. It also found no evidence for the allegation by Corporal Clifford Carlson, who voluntarily left the Marine Corps a few months after taping Leberman, that “deception has been going on for over 2 years.” After Article 15 hearings, a voluntary alternative to a court-martial, Leberman was found guilty of dereliction of duty and conduct unbecoming an officer and Colonel James E. Schleining was found guilty of dereliction of duty. They received letters of reprimand, a penalty that damages, and often kills, an officer’s chances of promotion. Assistant maintenance officer Captain Christopher Ramsey, who had denied telling mechanics to write “down” aircraft as “up,” was found guilty of dereliction of duty because he knew of false maintenance reports. He was cleared, however, on charges of making false statements and conduct unbecoming an officer. Ramsey received no punishment.

  Uncertain when the Osprey might fly again, or whether it ever would beyond the tests Navair was planning, higher-ups at the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing and some at Headquarters Marine Corps were eager to transfer many of VMMT-204’s pilots and maintainers to other squadrons. Some wanted to go ahead and disband VMMT-204, whose purpose was to train pilots and mechanics for future Osprey squadrons. Headquarters decided to keep VMMT-204 in operation, but by early summer, it was clear its Ospreys weren’t going to fly again for a long time. In mid-July, eight officers and thirty-three enlisted Marines were transferred out. By fall, the Marine Corps decided to move another thirty-two enlisted maintainers to Patuxent River to work on the redesign and testing of the Osprey that Navair was planning. Before long, VMMT-204’s head count was down to about seventy, with just a handful of officers. Senior officers at the wing and headquarters were privately advising those pilots left to move on. Being assigned to the Osprey once had been a badge of distinction, an honor. Now people were being told it could damage their careers. Rock went down the list of officers left one day and came to a jolting realization. I’m the last son of a bitch around here who’s even flown this airplane, he thought. I’m going to be the last guy standing here turning off the lights. By then, the only other member of the squadron who had ever flown the Osprey was Colonel Dunnivan, and he had logged all of one hour in it, the day Crossbow 08 crashed.

  Rock began to worry about the Marine Corps career he had begun the day he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy on May 25, 1988, two days after Bell and Boeing rolled out the first Osprey prototype in Fort Worth. Born in Baltimore and raised as an “Army brat,” Rock was the son of a soldier who had enlisted out of high school, served in Vietnam, and retired as a lieutenant colonel. Paul Jr. decided he wanted to take his commission in the Marines after spending a week at Quantico Marine Base between his sophomore and junior years at Annapolis. He decided he wanted to be a pilot in the summer between his junior and senior years, when he was assigned to Marine Corps Base Hawaii at Kaneohe Bay, on the island of Oahu. He got a ride there in an F-4 Phantom fighter jet and a CH-46 helicopter and that settled it. Flying was the greatest. You strapped on a big machine and went up and defied the law of gravity. How cool was that? When he finished flight school at Pensacola, Florida, and got his wings, in December 1990, Rock chose helicopters and asked to be assigned to a CH-46 squadron on the East Coast. He got his wish, and early the next year joined up with Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron 263, known as HMM-263, as the unit was coming back from the 1991 Gulf War. Six years later, after he had become a CH-46 instructor, Rock put in a request to switch to the Osprey. He had heard ever since he joined the Corps that the Osprey was the future of Marine aviation, and he wanted to be part of that future. Rock was selected for the MOTT in 1997, one of six pilots chosen out of dozens who applied, but it was two years before he got his first chance to fly the Osprey. When he did, on June 11, 1999, he fell in love with it. Now the Osprey was in trouble, and Rock feared his career was, too. He had to think about that and what it might mean not just for himself, but for his wife, Maria, and their three young children.

  Rock decided to stay with the Osprey and VMMT-204 after a talk with Dunnivan. “Look, we’re fighting a good fight here on a number of fronts,” Dunnivan said. By then, Navair had begun its redesign of the Osprey and was preparing to start the flight-testing Aldridge had approved. Rock was now VMMT-204’s maintenance officer. He and several of his mechanics were advising Navair and Bell on how to fix the nacelles. Dunnivan had decided the squadron also should take the Osprey’s mistake-riddled electronic maintenance manual and perform each of its thousands of tasks one by one to validate or correct them. Dunnivan wanted Rock to supervise that tedious chore.

  “You’re the last guy I’ve got with any credibility piloting the airplane,” Dunnivan told Rock. “I’m certainly not going to make you, but I’d like it if you stayed.” Dunnivan also told Rock he should consider what staying might do to his career. Officers from higher headquarters had been telling Rock he should leave. Dunnivan couldn’t tell Rock they weren’t right.

  Rock thought it over. He wasn’t eager to stay, but he had a lot of respect for the enlisted Marines who worked for him. He knew he’d have a guilty conscience if, for the sake of his own career, he left those Marines behind, saddled with the humdrum work that lay ahead. He also still believed in the Osprey. Rock decided he couldn’t leave.

  Over the next two years, Rock sometimes wondered if he’d made the right decision. He later came to think of that time as The Dark Ages.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  PHOENIX

  By December 2001, when Undersecretary of Defense Pete Aldridge first ignored his advice to kill it, the Osprey had become Harry Dunn’s Moby Dick and Harry Dunn the Osprey’s Captain Ahab. Dunn mulled and plotted day and night on how to slay the Osprey. Working by computer and phone from his home on Florida’s Merritt Island, just north of Cape Canaveral, he scoured the Internet and filed Freedom of Information Act requests for government reports on the Osprey. He e-mailed attorneys who had filed lawsuits against Bell and Boeing on behalf of relatives of those killed in the Osprey’s crashes, asking
the lawyers to send him documents and offering to help with their research. He devoured engineering studies and other reports on rotor-craft that might bolster his case that the Osprey’s side-by-side rotors were a fatal flaw. He sought out academic experts for help.

  Dunn also contacted newspaper reporters who covered the Osprey, telling them about the “findings” of his “Red Ribbon Panel,” which he described as an “organization” with more than one hundred members— a gross exaggeration. “Essentially there were about eight of us who did all this work,” Dunn acknowledged when I met him years later.

  “My impression is that Harry Dunn was the Red Ribbon Panel,” I said.

  “That was it,” Dunn replied with a smile.

  Newspapers and magazines all around the country were writing about the Osprey during what Paul Rock called the Dark Ages, and Harry Dunn wasn’t the only critic quoted. Others with credentials were willing to comment, too, especially helicopter pilots, who sometimes thought the Osprey’s advocates talked as if tiltrotors were going to replace all helicopters someday. The outside critic who worried Navair, Bell-Boeing, and the Marine Corps the most, though, was Dunn, for they thought they saw his arguments reflected in questions Undersecretary Aldridge was asking in quarterly meetings on the Osprey and his periodic briefings from Navair.

  Many of those working on the Osprey wanted to reply to Dunn and other critics quoted in the media in 2001. Bell and Boeing, though, were lying low because of lawsuits filed by relatives of those killed in the crashes and the political risk of speaking out. Marine Corps leaders were wary of defending the Osprey too aggressively unless it proved itself. After all, twenty-three Marines had just died in it. Colonel Dick Dunnivan and his pilots at VMMT-204, though, were itching to fire back, and they got permission from the commandant to do that late in 2001. When Dunn published an article in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that November saying the Osprey “would be a disaster in Afghanistan or anywhere else,” Major Paul Rock wrote a reply, which the Star-Telegram published under the headline “Don’t sell the V-22 short.” Rock, Dunnivan, and Lieutenant Colonel Ronald S. “Curly” Culp, who like Rock had flown the Osprey in its Operational Evaluation, shared a triple byline.

  “We like to think we’ve accumulated a little bit of experience in this arena ourselves and so feel qualified to respond to Dunn’s familiar claims,” the pilots wrote. Dunn was right in saying it would be “some time” before the Osprey was ready for service, they conceded, but he was wrong in writing that the Osprey’s range was far less than advertised, that its cabin was too small to actually carry twenty-four Marines, and that it couldn’t land on dirt or sand because its powerful rotor downwash would kick up pilot-blinding brownouts. The Osprey could “launch in the morning in California and land less than eight hours later within sight of the Atlantic Ocean (a non-stop trip made in the MV-22, by the way, by some of the authors of this essay).” The pilots had flown the Osprey with twenty-four troops in back and landed in the desert many times, they said.

  Rock wasn’t sure the response would do much good, but it felt good to fight back. Rock’s co-author Culp wasn’t done. Culp telephoned Dunn and invited him to visit New River. He could get inside an Osprey, fly the computerized simulator, ask any questions he wanted, Culp promised. Dunn turned him down.

  Seven years later, Dunn still had never seen an Osprey firsthand. “Didn’t need to,” he told me.

  * * *

  Marine Corps Colonel Daniel Schultz saw the Osprey firsthand a lot, but he was especially eager to see it on May 29, 2002. That morning, Schultz was standing on the edge of a taxiway at Patuxent River Naval Air Station, waiting for the most important event yet in the eleven months since he’d taken over Navair’s Osprey program. Out on the runway was Osprey Number 10, one of the prototypes built in the mid-1990s. Its nacelles were pointed skyward, its rotors whirling. Seventeen months after the New River crash, the Osprey was about to fly again for the first time.

  Schultz had come in with a mandate from Navy Secretary Gordon England to make sure the Osprey succeeded in what everyone knew was its last chance. England, an engineer who had spent forty years working for defense contractors, flew to New River to examine the Osprey in June 2001, two weeks after he came into office. He found the design of its nacelles “extraordinarily poor.” The Osprey’s biggest problem, though, had been poor management, England later concluded. Bell-Boeing’s 50–50 partnership, which left neither company in charge, had led to bad or tardy decisions when disputes couldn’t be settled. England told the companies to give the head of their joint office authority to make commitments on behalf of both companies and funds to cover contingencies. With England’s blessing, Schultz ordered Bell and Boeing to move their Osprey office to Pax River. From now on, company and Navair engineers would work in “Integrated Product Teams” with adjoining offices.

  Their first task was to remake the Osprey as the Blue Ribbon Commission had recommended— revamp its nacelles, retest its flight control software, change hardware that had created problems. As the team redesigning the nacelles got started, Schultz had the engineers work with enlisted Marine mechanics from VMMT-204 to inject hands-on experience into the exercise. Rock, VMMT-204’s maintenance officer by then, flew to Texas in the spring of 2001 with some Marine mechanics for the first big meeting on the issue, a gathering of about 150 engineers and others from Bell-Boeing and Navair. Rock had never seen so many smart people in one room. He figured the engineers all had master’s or Ph.D. degrees. The enlisted maintainers, usually high school graduates at most, were intimidated at first, one mechanic who took part told me. Soon the maintainers spoke up, though, bluntly telling the engineers that parts of the Osprey’s original nacelle design had been dumb. “Engineers are very smart people, but you give them a wrench and put them on the aircraft and say, ‘Put that screw into that hole you were talking about,’ and then they would start to see and appreciate that, ‘Well, you know what? If I put that screw an arm’s length into that cavity in the airplane, I’m not exactly going to be able to screw it in there, because you can’t hold the screwdriver and the screw at the same time without dropping it,’ ” this mechanic said.

  The engineers and mechanics came up with various ways to protect the Osprey’s hydraulic lines, such as rerouting wire bundles through special trays. They also designed new access panels so mechanics could inspect and work inside the nacelles more easily. Schultz and his staff devised a plan to incorporate those and other changes into existing and future production model Ospreys. In the meantime, Navair would fly tests with the four remaining prototypes built in the 1990s to establish just how vulnerable the Osprey really was to vortex ring state, to study its handling qualities when landing on a heaving, windy ship deck, and to define its ability to maneuver at low airspeeds. First, though, the Osprey had to start flying again.

  Tom Macdonald of Boeing, the program’s chief test pilot, and Bell Helicopter test pilot Bill Leonard were at the controls as Schultz watched the Osprey’s return to flight in May 2002. Macdonald and Leonard had flown about a thousand hours in Ospreys between them during their careers, but today they would take no chances. They would fly by the rules for the first flight of a brand-new aircraft—with utmost caution. First they just hovered about twenty feet over the runway for three minutes, then gently set the Osprey back down. Then they did another vertical takeoff, flew around the airfield in helicopter mode for an hour and a half, and landed. A little later, they did a rolling takeoff, tilted the rotors forward into airplane mode, and climbed to 2,000 feet. They took the Osprey up to about 285 miles per hour, flew twenty minutes, then landed for the day.

  Ordinarily, such flights would have been regarded as routine. Schultz couldn’t have been more excited. When Macdonald and Leonard first took off, Schultz let out a whoop. When the pilots landed for the final time, Schultz went over to Macdonald and shook his hand. Then he gave him a hug.

  * * *

  By the summer of 2002, Harry Dunn had discovered Rex Rivolo,
the Institute for Defense Analyses expert assigned to monitor the Osprey for the Pentagon’s Office of Operational Test and Evaluation. Dunn and Rivolo saw eye-to-eye on the Osprey’s design. Both thought its side-by-side rotors and their size and twist made it unsuitable as a combat rotor-craft. Unlike Dunn, however, Rivolo wasn’t trying to kill the Osprey; he just saw it as his job to make sure those who were going to decide its fate understood the shortcomings he saw. Even if he and Dunn had different goals, however, Rivolo was glad to find an ally. Rivolo had been frustrated by his inability to get his views on the Osprey accepted within the government over the past two years, and his efforts had made him more than unpopular at the Osprey program office. He was still tracking the Osprey for the Pentagon, though, and Navair was under orders to let Rivolo sit in as it planned flight tests to find the Osprey’s vortex ring state boundary. Rivolo was “very, very vocal” in those meetings, recalled Donald Byrne, Bell-Boeing’s flight test director at the time. “He would sit there and say, ‘You’re all wrong. You’re not doing it right. You need to do this, you need to do that. You need to get into vortex ring state and demonstrate that it can roll at least ninety degrees and recover the aircraft successfully.’ ” The test pilots and engineers rejected a lot of Rivolo’s suggestions as unnecessary and too dangerous, but they were under orders to address his concerns. Rivolo, Byrne volunteered, “was a nuisance.”