Spivey had the magazine with him when he got to Schaefer’s office at MAWTS-1. Schaefer had just come in from working out and was still in gym clothes. Spivey saw burn marks on his legs.
“Jim, have you seen this?” Spivey asked, handing him the Newsweek.
“No, I haven’t,” Schaefer said, frowning as he took the magazine. He’d written a harsh letter to Newsweek swearing never to read it again after its May 5 issue, whose cover story, “Fiasco in Iran,” included an Associated Press photo showing the charred remains of Schaefer’s helicopter and one of the Americans killed at Desert One. Schaefer recognized the corpse as his crew chief. He barely glanced at the article Spivey handed him with its photo of Schaefer being wheeled into the hospital.
“Well, you know what I think about that?” Schaefer sneered.
“No, what?”
In one fluid motion, Schaefer turned around, bent over, grabbed his gym shorts with both hands, and mooned Spivey.
They nearly busted a gut laughing.
Within a few weeks, Schaefer and other helicopter pilots were training up for a possible second try at rescuing the hostages. Operation Honey Badger, as this one was called, became moot on January 20, 1981, when Iran released the Americans precisely as Ronald Reagan took the oath of office as president. Reagan had won the election partly by portraying Carter as weak-kneed. Reagan promised to get tough with America’s foes, not only the Islamic revolutionaries in Iran but also the Soviet Union. Moscow had grown bold with America’s demoralization after Vietnam and Watergate. The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan in 1979. They were aiding leftist revolutionaries in Central America. Reagan warned of a new Soviet threat to Europe. He pledged to rebuild America’s military to counter it. Most generals and admirals were ecstatic to hear that, especially those in the business of buying weapons. The post-Vietnam years under Carter had been hell on procurement budgets. The Marines, for example, had been trying to get the Navy to put money into its long-term budget to replace their CH-46 troop transport helicopters. Carter’s political appointees had blocked them. Under Reagan, getting money for things like that was going to be a lot easier for those in the Pentagon.
* * *
Most military officers dread working in the Pentagon—“The Building,” as insiders call it. They’d rather be in the field or in the fleet, leading troops or sailors, or flying, if they’re pilots. Infantry officers like to be in the open air, out on the firing range hearing the crack of rifles or on maneuvers, smelling gunpowder and diesel exhaust as they hone their own and their troops’ combat skills. Pilots crave time in the cockpit putting a jet fighter or a helicopter through its paces, doing things they can tell stories about at the officers club. Working in The Building makes such officers feel like Jonah in the belly of the whale. They pray to get out.
The Pentagon is really five multistory buildings, constructed during World War II in a series of rings connected by ten long, spokelike corridors. The sprawling structure covers thirty-four acres, including an interior courtyard. It has 17.5 miles of hallways. The rings are lettered A through E and the corridors are numbered 1 through 10, but officers who go to work there for the first time can easily get lost—or lose focus, or grow cynical. Working in The Building saps the health and strains the home life of some. Aside from being cooped up in an office behind a desk, working in The Building means processing or creating paperwork by the pile. It means long hours on the job, often from well before sunup until well after sundown. It means sitting through interminable meetings day in and day out. It can mean taking guff from civilian bureaucrats and political appointees and congressional aides who fancy themselves astute military strategists, even if they’ve never worn a uniform or heard a shot fired in anger. “Action officers”—usually majors and lieutenant colonels or Navy lieutenant commanders and commanders—handle individual issues or programs. Depending on their personalities, that means they wield real power, for while action officers don’t officially decide things, the colonels they work for usually rely on their advice, and the generals above them usually rely on the advice of their colonels. Being an action officer, though, also can mean slaving against tight deadlines to get a program or decision ready for action, only to see it torpedoed or mangled or postponed for political reasons after the general signs off on it. Some action officers come off their Pentagon tours wan and weary. Some lose their lust for military service. Yet for an officer who wants to make senior rank—colonel or general in the Army, Air Force, and Marines; captain or admiral in the Navy—and thus get a major command, working in The Building is essential. In modern times, hardly anyone has risen to senior rank without working as an action officer. Most officers who hope to one day wear stars on their shoulders simply endure it.
Robert Magnus thrived on it. Brown-haired, blue-eyed, and charming when he wanted to be, Magnus was a New Yorker by birth, the youngest child of a bookkeeper and his seamstress wife. After Bobby was born in 1947 they moved from Flatbush in Brooklyn to Levittown on Long Island, where Magnus grew up in what he called “a typical Jewish home.” Unlike most other Jewish kids he knew, Magnus aspired to a career in the military. Magnus means “large” in Latin; Bobby Magnus wasn’t. He was five foot five when fully grown, and like a lot of little guys, sometimes he acted as if he had something to prove. Most of his friends’ parents wanted their sons to be doctors or lawyers or rabbis. Bobby grew up watching World War II movies and TV shows like The Silent Service, a 1950s series about submarine warfare. In his teens, he decided he wanted to be a naval gunnery officer, so he went to the University of Virginia on a Navy ROTC scholarship, majoring in European and Russian history. While he was there, he decided what he really wanted to be was a Marine infantry officer, like two of his most impressive ROTC instructors. When he graduated in 1969, Magnus was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps, then went to The Basic School at Quantico, Virginia, the first stop for new lieutenants. He intended to be an infantry officer, but a friend Magnus made there challenged him to apply for flight school instead. Bob Magnus couldn’t resist a challenge. He applied and became a helicopter pilot.
Magnus served his required four years, then developed a new ambition: making money. He got out and went to work on Wall Street. A year later, he found he didn’t much like it. He missed flying and he missed the Corps. He went back in, determined to make a career of it this time. He flew CH-46 Sea Knights at New River, North Carolina. He served in a staff job with a Marine air group. Then he went to MAWTS-1 and became a weapons and tactics instructor. At Yuma, squadron mates gave the Jewish kid from New York a radio call sign he liked, but which he stopped signing e-mails with years later because it bothered his wife. It was “Heeb.”
From MAWTS-1, Magnus volunteered for a tour at Headquarters Marine Corps, figuring he’d never make senior rank without serving there. In July 1980, Major Magnus reported for duty as an action officer in the Marine Corps aviation branch. The aviation branch decides what kind of aircraft and other aviation equipment the Corps needs, writes requirements for programs to provide them, and figures out how to fit those programs into the Marine Corps’ portion of the Navy Department budget.
If many action officers found the atmosphere at headquarters wilting, Magnus blossomed in it. At first, he got all the “SLJs”—shitty little jobs. He was the aircrew training devices officer. He was the nuclear, biological, and chemical defense gear officer. He was the coffee mess officer. He got all the assignments no one else wanted. He bit into them like a terrier, and his superiors loved him. Not long after Magnus arrived, Lieutenant Colonel Joe Moody, the action officer assigned to keep the Corps’ CH-46 Sea Knights in shape and recommend an aircraft to replace the Vietnam-era helicopters, told Magnus he wanted his help. The new assignment gave Magnus a license to talk with all manner of people, and he made extravagant use of it. Headquarters Marine Corps was in the Navy Annex, a drab, World War II- vintage four-story brick office building on a hill overlooking Arlington National Cemetery and the Pentagon. Magnu
s wasn’t there a lot. He was always in motion, it seemed, in the Pentagon, on Capitol Hill, or making trips to places where he could learn something or talk to someone who might help the Marines come up with a CH-46 replacement. He visited bureaucrats and officers in the Navy Department. He traveled to Marine bases to gather data on how long the CH-46 might last and talk to pilots about what the Corps’ next troop transport ought to be able to do. He went to aircraft factories and talked to industry reps about possible replacements for the Phrog. He came back and gave briefings to generals and admirals on what he found out. One of Magnus’s bosses toward the end of his first tour in the aviation branch was Colonel Robert Balch. “I wrote a fitness report for him that said, ‘This major is the best colonel I’ve ever had working for me,’ ” Balch chuckled. “Magnus always thought at least two ranks ahead and acted two ranks ahead.”
Through his research and travels, Magnus became intrigued by the XV-15 tiltrotor that Bell Helicopter had developed for NASA and the Army. Bell had built two XV-15s by 1980 and was doing flight tests with one in Fort Worth. NASA had the other at its Ames Research Center outside Palo Alto, California. Somewhere during that period, Magnus met Dick Spivey, who came by the aviation branch one day to introduce himself. They started talking on the phone regularly, and when Spivey was in Washington, he often went to see Magnus. He would update him on the XV-15 and talk about other possible tiltrotor designs and how they might fit into the Marine Corps. Spivey soon began to feel that in Magnus he had a potential ally. Magnus was just a major, but he was full of energy and ideas, and he wasn’t shy about sharing them. What Spivey liked about him most, though, was that Magnus saw promise in the tiltrotor.
* * *
Magnus wasn’t the only Marine officer getting interested in the tiltrotor. Spivey had been talking up the concept to officers in the aviation branch long before Magnus got there. One of them was Bob Balch, back then still a lieutenant colonel and an action officer himself. “Spivey and I talked a lot, and we talked about how to do some of the selling of the idea up front,” Balch recalled. Balch told Spivey that if Bell hoped to sell tilt-rotors to the Marine Corps, it would have to come up with one far bigger than the two-seat XV-15 demonstrator. A tiltrotor for the Marines would need to carry at least twenty-four troops fully loaded for combat, he advised.
Balch also helped Bell keep the XV-15 flying in 1978, when NASA and the Army came close to shutting the project down. One day that year, one of Balch’s counterparts in the Army, an action officer who worked on his service’s aviation programs, dropped by the aviation branch and told Balch, “Hey, the Army’s getting ready to do something stupid.” The inflation rate had hit double digits in the late 1970s, eroding the government’s buying power just as the XV-15 program was at its most expensive. NASA had put one of the two XV-15s into its wind tunnel at Ames recently and the tests had left the aircraft unfit to fly. Bell still had one XV-15 flying in Fort Worth, but to the chagrin of the NASA and Army engineers working on the tiltrotor, neither NASA’s nor the Army’s top leaders wanted to spend the money to get the XV-15 at Ames back in the air. NASA’s priority was its space program; the Army was more interested in spending its rotary wing aircraft research money on a new attack helicopter.
Balch took this nugget of information to Lieutenant General Tom Miller, who was now a few months from retirement as deputy chief of staff for aviation. Miller already knew about the XV-15, which his staff had briefed him on after he’d seen the film of the Canadian tilt-wing aircraft, and he was interested in the tiltrotor. Miller told Balch he’d see if he couldn’t get the Navy to come up with some money to keep the XV-15 flying.
Miller called a Navy rear admiral he had known for years. They went to see the assistant secretary of the Navy for research and development, David E. Mann, and persuaded Mann to put enough money into the XV-15 program to keep it going. Mann agreed that the Navy and the Marines ought to see whether this tiltrotor technology had any potential for them. The Naval Air Systems Command, known as Navair, put $4 million into the NASA/Army XV-15 program over the next three years, starting in 1979.
After the Navy started investing in the XV-15, the agency’s leaders decided to send a pilot to Fort Worth to fly the one Bell had there and write a report. In October 1979, an order to do that came to the director of the Attack/Assault Branch of the Rotary Wing Aircraft Test Directorate at Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland, where Navair’s test pilots work. Marine Major William S. Lawrence, the director, thought the assignment looked interesting, so he gave it to himself. Test pilots love to record “firsts,” and up until then, only three other men had flown the XV-15: Bell test pilots Ron Erhart and Dorman Cannon and NASA pilot Dan Dugan, a former Army lieutenant colonel. Bill Lawrence liked the idea of being the first Marine to fly the XV-15. Besides, Fort Worth was Lawrence’s hometown.
When he first saw the XV-15, Lawrence was surprised at how compact it was, and how sleek. It was only about 42 feet long, roughly the length of a Huey helicopter. Bell had designed the XV-15 small so it would fit into NASA’s 40-foot-by-80-foot wind tunnel. The little tiltrotor’s fuselage looked something like an executive jet; the rear cabin was large enough to hold eight or nine passengers but was crammed with instruments to monitor and record data picked up by strain gauges attached to nearly every part of the aircraft. The XV-15’s wings were swept forward six and a half degrees on each side, giving it a rakish look. The angle was needed to keep its two big rotors—25 feet in diameter each—from flapping and scraping the wings when swiveling pods that held the craft’s rotors on the wingtips swung them down so the XV-15 could fly like an airplane. The rotors were interesting, too. Unlike the predecessor XV-3 Convertiplane’s flimsy-looking helicopter rotors, the XV-15’s had three blades and a special twist to make them function more like propellers when tilted forward. Lawrence thought the XV-15 looked a lot like some of the little twin-engine turboprop airplanes he’d flown.
Dorman Cannon gave Lawrence two half-hour familiarization flights on May 19 and 20, 1980, at Bell’s Flight Research Center at Arlington Municipal Airport, a few miles from Fort Worth. Lawrence returned June 5 and flew the XV-15 with Cannon two more times during the next four days. Twenty-seven years later, he still felt that of the 110 different aircraft he’d piloted in his career, the XV-15 was by far the easiest to fly. It was also the most fun, for it seemed to defy the ordinary laws of aerodynamics.
A pilot can slow a conventional fixed-wing airplane one of two ways: either by decreasing power or by increasing the “angle of attack,” meaning the angle at which the wing hits the air. Decrease power to slow down without changing the angle of attack and the airplane will lose altitude; increase power to go faster without changing the angle of attack and the aircraft will climb. To counter those effects and maintain altitude while speeding up or slowing down, the pilot also has to change the plane’s angle of attack.
Lawrence was amazed to find that the tiltrotor was immune to the customary relationship between angle of attack and airspeed. This was so because it got lift not just from its wings but also from its rotors. Flying in airplane mode, the pilot could reduce the XV-15’s airspeed without losing altitude simply by pushing a thumb switch that tilted the rotors upward a few degrees. No need to change the angle of attack because the lift from the rotors would compensate for the loss of wing lift at a slower speed. No conventional airplane or helicopter could do that. “It was just unique in that regard,” he said. Lawrence took a cassette tape recorder on his XV-15 flights to record his comments so he could listen to them while writing his report for Navair. On the tape of the first flight in which he took the controls, Lawrence can be heard gushing about the ease of flying the tiltrotor and the surprising things it could do. “This is just goin’ slicker ’n grease,” Lawrence says as he and Cannon prepare to put the craft into a practice stall. “It’s smoother ’n silk,” he says a few minutes later as they convert from airplane mode to helicopter flight. “It just floats along.” As they climb w
ith the nacelles tilted at 70 degrees, Lawrence marvels that “there’s just no pilot workload.” When they descend again in airplane mode, Lawrence tells Cannon, “Got to love it.” Lawrence chuckles as he makes his first landing, slowing the aircraft to a hover, then setting it down gently on the runway. After they taxi back to the ramp and shut down the engines, the doors are heard opening. “Let’s get out of this hotbox,” Cannon tells Lawrence. As they climb out, Lawrence is heard again. “Woooo!” he whoops. “Well, Dorman, that is all right. I think you got yourself a machine.”
Lawrence was still grinning when he got to the hangar and met with a bunch of Bell engineers and others. One was Dick Spivey, whose title since 1974 had been Manager, Military Tilt Rotor Business Development. Spivey struck Lawrence as a real schmoozer, but he liked him. Spivey had arranged for a photographer to snap pictures of Lawrence in the XV-15. After Lawrence left Fort Worth, Spivey also had someone on his staff get a certificate printed up for the pilot commemorating his flight and send it to him.
Before his XV-15 flights, Lawrence hadn’t thought much about the tiltrotor; afterward, he was sold. Back at Patuxent River, he wrote a 44-page report that said the tiltrotor held “excellent potential for a variety of Navy/Marine Corps V/STOL missions.” The report went to Navair, then began floating around Headquarters Marine Corps. Lawrence also went to the Navy Annex to brief the concept to the deputy chief of staff for aviation, Lieutenant General William J. White, who had replaced Tom Miller in June 1979. Spivey noted Lawrence’s meeting with White in his work diary. He also had his staff look into buying plaques that Bell could give to future XV-15 “guest pilots.” Spivey and others at Bell could see from Lawrence’s reaction that the XV-15 wasn’t just a successful experiment, it could also be powerful marketing tool. They started making plans to use it that way.
The Dream Machine Page 10
