As 1980 ended, Spivey felt things were finally looking up. He and a handful of others at Bell had spent eight years now marketing the tiltrotor to the military without getting close to a sale. It was still hard to tell if one was coming soon, but now they had a powerful argument for the tiltrotor in the disaster at Desert One, they had a crackerjack marketing tool in the XV-15, and they had a growing list of Marine Corps allies. For years, Spivey and Bell had focused mainly on selling the tiltrotor to the Army, the Navy, or the Air Force, the services with the biggest budgets. Now Spivey was beginning to think the most likely customer might be the one with the least to spend but the greatest need—the one most anxious to replace a big part of its helicopter fleet, the one most eager to surpass the helicopter’s limited speed, the one most paranoid about its future, the one most skilled at getting its way with Congress. The Marine Corps.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE SALE
Paris is seductive, especially in late spring. Artists, poets, songwriters, lovers have known it forever. For decades, so have the world’s top aviation executives, which is why almost all of them show up for the biennial Paris Air Show. They gripe about the cost and bother of bringing their aircraft to Le Bourget, the historic airfield northeast of Paris where Lindbergh landed and the show is staged. They grumble about the expense of renting chalets on the flight line to wine and dine VIPs as they watch planes and helicopters fly. They grouse about rushing back into Paris each evening to attend lavish dinners and receptions for potential customers and the media at posh hotels and famed restaurants. Still, almost all of them go, for there is something about Paris in the spring that can seduce a customer just as it can a lover. Big deals are often consummated, or at least conceived, during the Paris Air Show.
James F. Atkins learned that even before he became president of Bell Helicopter in 1972. Some of Bell’s best deals over the years had sprung from relaxed conversations with customers at the Paris Air Show. It was at Paris in 1971, when Atkins was a vice president and preparing to take over the company, that Iran’s deputy minister of war for armaments told him the Shah was interested in Bell’s helicopters. That chat led to Bell’s biggest foreign sale ever—$500 million for nearly five hundred utility and attack helicopters. After the initial contract, Iran gave the company another multimillion-dollar deal to train 4,500 military pilots and 6,000 mechanics while providing all the support needed to keep Iran’s choppers flying. By the late 1970s, Bell had set up a subsidiary to handle the work, whose value ran into the billions. Bell Helicopter International had 5,000 employees and 8,000 dependents living in Iran—so many, the Shah’s government built an entire village to house them at Isfahan.
The Iran contracts helped Bell remain profitable during the 1970s, an otherwise disappointing decade for the company. First Bell lost an Army competition to build a new utility helicopter to replace the service’s Bell Hueys. Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation, a subsidiary of United Technologies, won that multibillion-dollar contract with its new UH-60 Black Hawk. Then Bell lost a four-year competition to provide attack helicopters to replace the HueyCobras the Army had used in Vietnam. The Army bought AH-64 Apaches from Hughes Helicopters. The Iran deal eased Bell’s pain at losing its best U.S. military customer. By 1980, though, the Shah was gone—deposed by Islamic revolutionaries and chased out of the country to die of cancer in Egypt—and so was Bell’s business in Iran. Jim Atkins saw the end coming in September 1978, when he had his last of many meetings with the Shah. They were seated side by side on a love seat in the monarch’s palace. Revolutionaries were marching in the capital nearly every day, sometimes rioting. “There is no problem in the streets,” the Shah replied dismissively when Atkins asked how he planned to deal with the unrest. As Atkins rode to the airport, his car became engulfed in a street battle between protesters and the Shah’s police. The driver had the American executive slump down in the backseat. Atkins got through unharmed but unnerved. When he returned to Fort Worth, he had Bell lease ten Boeing 747s from Pan Am and evacuate its employees’ dependents from Iran. After the Shah fled in January 1979, Bell started evacuating its employees as well. The last got out in December, a month after students stormed the U.S. Embassy and took the Americans there hostage.
After that, Jim Atkins was eagerly searching for new military business, and as he surveyed the possibilities, the best shot he saw for Bell to establish a new market for one of its products wasn’t a helicopter. For years, Atkins and other Bell executives had seen the tiltrotor largely as a science experiment. Now, with the market for military helicopters saturated, with the XV-15 proving you could build an aircraft that would fly both like a helicopter and an airplane, and with the failed Iran rescue mission of April 1980 inspiring the military to take a harder look at new technologies, the tiltrotor became a business proposition for Atkins. Naturally, his thoughts turned to Paris.
One day Bell test pilot Dorman Cannon was sitting in his office when the phone rang. Cannon, a former Marine Corps helicopter pilot, raised in Texas, nearly stood and snapped to attention when his caller identified himself. It wasn’t every day the president of Bell Helicopter called you on your own little telephone.
“Dorman, I’m thinking of taking the XV-15 to the Paris Air Show,” Atkins said. “What would you think of it?”
“Mr. Atkins, in my opinion, it’s too green,” Cannon told him. “We just haven’t matured the flight envelope enough to go to the Paris Air Show.”
“Well thank you, Dorman. I value your opinion,” Atkins said, ringing off.
Bell’s other XV-15 test pilot, Ron Erhart, soon got the same call. He gave Atkins the same answer.
Not long afterward, a hundred or so Bell managers gathered for an annual retreat at a lakeside tennis resort near Austin, in the verdant Texas hill country. Atkins stunned the group. “We’ve been flying the XV-15,” he said. “We’ve had pretty good results. Let’s consider taking it to Paris.” Several of the engineers spoke up. Like the test pilots, they were opposed. Flying the XV-15 in Paris would be risky, they warned. What if it crashed? What if parts broke and they couldn’t get it to fly some of its scheduled demonstrations? What if it flew and no one cared? Where would they be then? Besides, getting to Le Bourget would mean disassembling the XV-15 so it would fit into a cargo plane, putting it back together and flight-testing it once it arrived, flying it for ten days straight during the show, then taking it apart, hauling it back to Texas, and putting it back together again. The engineers would lose weeks of flight test time. It would cost a ton of money, too.
Dick Spivey was all for it. Sure it would be risky, but it might be worth it, Spivey thought. Spivey had proved the previous summer he wasn’t afraid to take risks to sell the tiltrotor. Against Cannon’s better judgment, Spivey had talked the test pilot into doing a vertical takeoff in the XV-15, putting it into a low hover and then accelerating to top speed while simultaneously tilting the rotors into airplane mode as fast as possible. The conversion would take twelve seconds. Spivey wanted to make a film of the maneuver to show potential buyers how fast the tiltrotor could exit a landing zone—a big selling point for a combat aircraft. Spivey stationed photographers at various points around the runway at Arlington Municipal Airport on July 30, 1979, to capture the “get out of Dodge” move Cannon was to perform. The cameras faithfully recorded what could have been a final flight for Cannon, fellow test pilot Erhart, and their XV-15. Cannon put the XV-15 into a low hover over a helicopter landing pad on the ramp, then headed south a few feet above a grass field parallel to the runway, using the thumb switch to swivel the rotors forward as fast as they’d go. The air was calm, and with no headwind to help boost relative speed, the XV-15 didn’t accelerate fast enough. The rotors were already in full airplane mode, tilted straight ahead like propellers and describing a circle whose lower arc reached more than twelve feet below the wing, before the wing fully took over the job of providing lift. With the rotors no longer supplying any, the XV-15 lost a couple of feet of altitude, putting the
lower arc of the rotors on a collision course with a barbed-wire fence and some hackberry trees at the end of the field. Neither Cannon nor Erhart noticed the looming disaster at first, but at the last second Cannon pulled back on the stick and pointed the XV-15’s nose up. The aircraft cleared the fence but the pilots heard one rotor scrape the tops of the trees. Spivey and others watching from nearby heard it, too: “Pop-pop-pop-pop.”
“Oh, shit!” Spivey muttered through clenched teeth as Cannon whipped the XV-15 into a tight turn so he could set it back down on the field in a hurry. Spivey and the others ran over as Cannon and Erhart climbed out. There was no major damage, but the strain gauges on the end of one rotor’s blades had torn loose and the tips of the blades were stained green. Cannon figured higher-ups at Bell were going to be very unhappy about this near accident with the XV-15. When he, Erhart, Spivey, and the engineers convened in the hangar to talk about what had happened, Cannon let them know he wasn’t going to take the blame alone. “Okay, I’m going to find out which one of you bastards is going to stick with me after this,” Cannon told them. For a minute, it was so quiet he could hear himself breathe.
Spivey knew he’d just about instigated a disaster that could have cost Bell a wad of money and himself his job, maybe even injured or killed Cannon and Erhart. But he really wanted that get-out-of-Dodge film to show military customers, and when he looked at what the photographers had gotten, he thought it wasn’t bad. Spivey waited a few months until everybody had cooled down, then started showing the film to people. When the XV-15 program manager, Tommy H. Thomason, heard about it, he was livid. “Tommy says he will get me fired if I use the tree chop movie any more,” Spivey recorded in his work diary. He stopped showing it. Not that Thomason was surprised. Thomason felt Spivey was a loose cannon, always doing what he thought best to promote the tiltrotor, regardless of direction or orders from above. Spivey’s favorite saying irked Thomason no end: “It’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission.”
Risky or not, taking the XV-15 to Paris sounded like a great idea to Spivey, no matter what the test pilots and engineers might think. By 1980, he’d been marketing the tiltrotor full-time for eight years with only nibbles. The salesman was hungry for a sale.
Jim Atkins was eager to sell the tiltrotor, too. Not the XV-15, which was built purely to prove a tiltrotor was feasible. The XV-15 was a technology demonstrator made from parts designed for other aircraft, not a production model built for real missions. Its engines guzzled fuel and its empty weight to gross weight ratio was lousy. It couldn’t carry much more than two pilots, about a thousand pounds of instruments needed to record its every move, and enough fuel to fly 400 miles or so. The purpose of taking it to Paris wouldn’t be to sell the XV-15; it would be to show the aviation world that tiltrotor technology was proven, mature, ready to be applied to new, bigger aircraft.
Atkins thought his engineers and pilots too cautious. Unlike a lot of aviation executives, he wasn’t an engineer or a pilot himself. He’d joined Bell Aircraft in the 1940s as an accounts payable clerk and worked his way to the top. He was a finance expert, astute at deciding where to put the company’s money. Bell’s parent corporation, a Rhode Island conglomerate called Textron Inc., which had bought Bell Helicopter in 1960, let Atkins run it more or less independently, and he prided himself on being a hands-on manager. Atkins ignored the chain of command and dug down into the company, talking to people several ranks below to make sure he knew what was really going on. He was always a gentleman with them, as dignified as he looked and almost courtly in his manner, though he could be stern when he thought you’d done something wrong. He combed his full head of graying hair straight back from his forehead, which with his piercing eyes gave him the look of an eagle. The look reflected his attitude. Atkins had a keen eye for business and confidence in his own judgment. He had already talked to NASA about taking the XV-15 to Paris and the agency was amenable. NASA’s mandate since its founding had been to keep the United States at the global forefront of aviation and space technology, and those in charge of its XV-15 program were as avid as Bell to promote the tiltrotor. At the Austin retreat, Atkins let his managers air their views awhile, then said, “Well, we’re going to go.”
* * *
Cannon and Erhart flew a carefully choreographed routine with the XV-15 every day from June 4 to 14 at the 1981 Paris Air Show. They wowed their audiences. The XV-15 looked sharp. It was painted white, with a thick blue stripe along the length of its sides and red trim at the tops and bottoms of its H-shaped double tail. Its fuselage bore the names of its sponsors—NASA, the Army, and Bell—along with its assigned air show number, 53. Cannon and Erhart traded off each day as aircraft commander; NASA’s Dan Dugan was always copilot. When the emcee announced the XV-15, they lifted it a dozen feet into the air over the ramp where they’d been waiting and slowly “air-taxied” out over the end of the runway with the rotors vertical, like a helicopter. They held the tiny tiltrotor there a few seconds to show how stable it was, then made a 360-degree turn while hovering in place. They flew it sideways a little in each direction, each time returning to their original spot over the runway. Next they aimed it down the runway, tilted the rotors aft, and flew backward at 25 or 30 miles per hour. Even as they did, they began swiveling the rotors forward again to 15 degrees, causing the XV-15 to pause in midair, then suddenly jump into forward flight. The effect was to make the tiltrotor look faster than it would have if it had started from a hover—a stunt to impress the audience.
As they flew over the runway at low level, they pushed the rotors fully forward, picking up speed as they did. By the time the rotors fully converted, the XV-15 was doing nearly 160 mph—faster than the cruising speed of most helicopters. Now they rolled into a hard left turn and then snapped the XV-15 back right 270 degrees, circling back in the direction they’d taken off from. They turned again at the end of the runway and made another low pass, then pulled up abruptly, converting back to helicopter mode as they did. They put the aircraft into a tight turn and a steep descent, then brought it to a hover over the spot on the runway where they’d started their routine. That was when Cannon and Erhart did a trick that really stole the show. They tilted the rotors 5 degrees aft while pushing the stick forward. When they did, instead of moving backward in the air, the XV-15 hovered in place and its nose dipped down. It looked as if the little thing was bowing to the crowd. No other rotorcraft could do that. Audiences just adored it. The New York Times wrote that “if ever there was a lovable plane, it is the Bell XV-15 . . . the hit of the show.”
* * *
A great piece of artistry, whether executed by a painter, a musician, a dancer, or a pilot flying an aerobatic routine, can affect the emotions of even the toughest men. John Lehman was a tough man. That was one reason newly elected President Ronald Reagan had chosen him as his first secretary of the Navy, the civilian who oversees the Navy and Marine Corps and holds sway over what they buy. When Lehman saw the XV-15 at the 1981 Paris Air Show, his pulse quickened.
Lehman was a flyer himself, a bombardier-navigator in A-6 Intruder fighter-bombers as a Naval Reserve lieutenant commander. After he became Navy secretary, he also started learning to fly helicopters. Lehman arrived at Paris and saw the XV-15 on June 5. That same day, the secretary’s military assistant, Marine Colonel Russ Porter, started making what turned into repeated visits to the Bell Helicopter chalet to deliver a message from his boss: Lehman wanted to fly in the XV-15. At the air show.
Now Dick Spivey’s pulse quickened. You didn’t get marketing opportunities like this every day. But after checking with colleagues, he had to turn Porter down. NASA said only test pilots Cannon, Erhart, and Dugan could fly the XV-15 at the air show. Porter left but came back a little later. Lehman wanted NASA to make an exception in his case. Discussions between Bell and NASA officials ensued, but the answer was the same. The XV-15 belonged to NASA, and NASA wasn’t allowing guest flights at the air show. Besides, the XV-15 pilots didn’t think the show’s
rules would permit them to fly a guest over Le Bourget, and they wouldn’t want to fly one outside the show. Getting permission to depart the field and return would be hard, and they weren’t familiar with the territory. Porter left again but was back a little later, this time acting a little steamed. Spivey was nearly as frustrated as Porter, who kept coming back, even though he always got the same answer. This went on for two days. Secretary Lehman didn’t like being told no.
They called him “Young Winston,” a moniker inspired by a 1972 movie of that name that recounted Winston Churchill’s youth. John Francis Lehman, Jr., bore no physical resemblance to the British political legend. At five-foot-nine and 175 pounds, Lehman was wiry, with a bend in his nose suggesting his pugnacious nature and a forelock of thick brown hair that tended to tumble down boyishly across his forehead. But like Churchill before World War I, Lehman was brassy, and he took over his nation’s Navy at a strikingly young age. Lehman was thirty-eight when he was sworn in as the nation’s sixty-fifth secretary of the Navy—the youngest in history.
Like Churchill, Lehman also had famous relatives. Born into a well-to-do Philadelphia family, he was a cousin to Princess Grace of Monaco, the former American actress Grace Kelly. His grandmother and Grace Kelly’s father were sister and brother. Lehman earned his undergraduate degree at St. Joseph’s College in Philadelphia, then earned a master’s in law and diplomacy from Cambridge University in England. He spent school vacations in Monaco with Princess Grace and her husband, Prince Rainier. After Cambridge, Lehman worked for Henry Kissinger at the National Security Council in President Richard Nixon’s White House. During Democrat Jimmy Carter’s presidency, Lehman was active in the Republican Party and wrote a book on aircraft carriers that argued for buying more big ones. He also had a defense consulting company based in Washington, the Abington Corporation, and was a defense adviser to Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign. All that and the backing of two powerful senators—Cold Warriors John Tower, a Texas Republican, and Henry M. Jackson of Washington, the leading hawk in the Democratic Party—helped Lehman land the Navy secretary job.
The Dream Machine Page 11
