The Marines began expanding their arguments. That spring, the Corps asked the Center for Naval Analyses for a new study on “the best arguments to get the V-22 program approved.” The center delivered the study in July. From then on, in Pentagon meetings, in congressional testimony, in articles for military journals, Marine officers described more and more things the tiltrotor would do for the Corps. The Osprey wasn’t just going to let them launch amphibious assaults from “over the horizon,” beyond the range of antiship missiles, it was also going to self-deploy—fly across oceans with aerial refueling. Helicopters can’t fly across oceans; when they go to war, they have to be carried on ships or dismantled, put into big cargo planes two or three at a time and flown to a staging area, then reassembled and flight-tested before they go into battle. Getting helicopters overseas takes weeks. The Osprey was going to fly itself over the ocean. That was going to give the Corps a unique way to live up to one of its mottos: “First to Fight.” If the Soviet Union invaded Western Europe—the worst military contingency imaginable in the 1980s—the Marines’ tiltrotors would fly to Europe in a day or two at most, meet ground troops there, and carry them into the fray right away. Knowing the Marines could do this would help deter the Soviets, some officers argued, and if a war began in Europe or elsewhere, the Osprey would be a “force multiplier.” It would give commanders a way to shuttle troops from one point to another before the enemy knew what had hit him, then shift them somewhere else to strike again. It would refuel other aircraft in-flight. It would rush casualties to medical treatment. It would keep frontline troops supplied with beans and bullets.
As the Marines expanded their arguments for the Osprey, the tiltrotor’s value seemed to increase in their own minds. Slowly but surely—not in a sudden shudder of inspiration, but in a gradual, osmotic way—the idea took hold within the Corps that the tiltrotor was going to transform the Marines. Without the Osprey, they would have to buy new helicopters to replace their old ones, and from time to time fend off those who wanted to reduce their cult of warriors to shipboard sheriffs and embassy guards, maybe even merge them with the Army. With the Osprey, they were going to be a vital weapon for the commander in chief, truly indispensable. The Marines would be first to fight, and when they fought, the tiltrotor would dazzle and confuse their enemies. The Osprey promised to ensure the Marine Corps’ future in a way that planting the flag on Mount Suribachi during the World War II battle of Iwo Jima hadn’t.
In time, winning at Iwo Jima would seem simple compared to getting the Osprey.
* * *
Lehman handpicked Colonel Harry Blot to take over the Osprey program. In the fall of 1985, with FSD on the horizon, the Osprey was getting expensive enough to attract attention from those eager to cut defense spending. Soaring federal budget deficits had prompted Congress that year to pass the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act, a law requiring automatic spending cuts if deficit targets weren’t met. Navair was going to need a strong hand on the reins to keep the Osprey on schedule and on budget. In Blot, Lehman thought he had his man.
Harold W. Blot grew up in the Bronx, graduated from Villanova University in 1962 with a mechanical engineering degree, then became a Marine Corps fighter pilot. He flew F-8 Crusader fighter-bombers in Vietnam, then became a test pilot and went into training to be an astronaut. When NASA’s manned orbital laboratory program was canceled, Blot was transferred to Patuxent River Naval Air Station in coastal Maryland, where Navy and Marine Corps aircraft are tested. Blot was sent to England to evaluate the Harrier when the Marines got interested in the vertical takeoff jet around 1970, and he joined the first Harrier squadron the Corps formed the next year. Later in the ’70s, he worked on the Harrier program at Navair, then came back a few years later to run it.
Lehman was impressed with how Blot had held McDonnell Douglas Corporation’s feet to the fire to fix a string of mechanical and other problems on the AV-8B Harrier, a new version of the jump jet. Lehman inquired about him and was told Blot was near the end of his expected three-year tour managing the Harrier program. Blot was eager to get out of Navair’s dull high-rise in Crystal City and back to flying. He was also hoping to get command of a Marine air group, which could lead to a promotion to brigadier general if he did the job well. Then a Navair admiral told him one day: “Harry, you’re not going to like this, but I’ve got the feeling that you’re going to be the next V-22 program manager.”
“Oh, no,” Blot said. Soon he got a call to report to the commandant’s office.
Commandant Kelley told Blot he’d tried to talk Lehman out of putting Blot in charge of the Osprey program. “Hey, we’re going to give him a group,” Kelley had told Lehman. “This guy has general potential,” meaning the rank.
“You mean if I put him in charge of the most important program in the Marine Corps that it will cause him not to make general?” Lehman replied. “If that’s true, then you’ve had your last Marine Corps program manager.”
After reciting that conversation, Kelley told Blot: “Harry, show up Monday.” As Blot walked toward the door, Kelley called after him.
“Harry?”
“Yes, sir?”
“When you get there, smile.”
* * *
By nature, Blot wasn’t a big smiler. He was a poker-faced listener with iceberg eyes—cold and piercing. Nor did he find much to smile about when he saw where things stood with the Osprey. Lehman had told him the program wasn’t coming together the way it should, and Blot agreed. Bell was paralyzed by the size and complexity of the program, afraid to make decisions, he found. “They just weren’t used to that many zeroes in the numbers,” Blot told me: “a million-dollar company with a billion-dollar program.” Boeing Vertol seemed more comfortable with the size of the project, but things were going slowly because the companies weren’t coordinating with each other. On paper, they had a Joint Program Office, but employees assigned to it worked in Fort Worth or Ridley Park, not together, and all decisions were made by higher-ups. Blot told Bell and Boeing to open a real joint office, locate it across the street from Navair in Crystal City, hire somebody savvy to run it, and give that person real authority. Under their teaming agreement, Bell had the right to name the Joint Program Office director, and Horner hired Clyde Skeen, a former top Boeing executive and a multimillionaire. Skeen was used to big numbers.
In April 1986, two weeks after the Defense Systems Acquisition Review Council approved FSD, Blot convened Bell and Boeing marketers and others in Crystal City to tell them what he wanted them to do to shore up the Osprey politically. According to Spivey’s notes, Blot said the Osprey’s problem was that “everyone is an enemy because of the costs.” A program this large had to be sold to the public. The companies weren’t doing enough advertising. They needed to talk the tiltrotor up in the press more—an “informed press is best,” Blot said—and the Marine Corps shouldn’t be the focus when they did. The point to emphasize was that the tiltrotor was a “new concept in aviation,” a “national asset” with “commercial fallout.” Blot also told them to stop thinking of the tiltrotor as a new kind of helicopter, a natural tendency for two helicopter companies. He said they needed a “fixed-wing mentality.”
Blot showed them what he meant by that when he went to Fort Worth on May 21, 1986, to fly the XV-15. He took the controls of the little tiltrotor from Bell pilot Ron Erhart and flew in formation with a helicopter and a turboprop airplane, a tricky thing for someone flying the XV-15 for the first time. Erhart thought Blot handled the aircraft beautifully. Blot was dissatisfied. He could have done better, Blot told Erhart, if the XV-15’s power control didn’t work like a helicopter’s.
Airplane and helicopter pilots have to manipulate three primary devices to control their aircraft: a center stick, foot pedals, and a power lever. In airplanes and helicopters both, direction is primarily controlled by the stick and pedals, which govern different mechanisms but move the same way in each type of aircraft. A helicopter’s stick and pedals change the pitch of its rotor b
lades. An airplane’s stick and pedals change the angles of its elevators, ailerons, and rudder. Osprey pilots wouldn’t have to think about this, for three flight control computers would handle the tricky transition between helicopter and airplane flight. When the rotors were providing most of the lift, the computers would make the Osprey’s stick and pedals control rotor blade pitch. When the Osprey gained enough forward speed for its wing to become its primary source of lift, the computers would gradually transfer the functions of the stick and pedals from changing the pitch of its rotor blades to operating its elevators, ailerons, and rudders. Designing the Osprey’s power lever, however, required making a choice between airplane and helicopter methods.
In airplanes and helicopters both, the lever that controls power is to the left of the pilot, but there the resemblance ends. In airplanes, the power lever is called a throttle and is normally mounted perpendicular to the floor. Pushing the throttle forward adds power, and thus speed; pulling it back reduces power and slows the plane down. In a helicopter, the power lever is called a “collective” because it alters the pitch of the rotor blades equally, or collectively, which increases or decreases total thrust. Unlike a throttle, a collective angles up from the floor like the emergency brake in many cars. Pulling the collective up and back adds thrust, causing the helicopter to rise or speed up; pushing it forward and down reduces power, causing the helicopter to slow or descend. Bell built helicopters, so when it designed the XV-15, it gave the tiltrotor a collective. Boeing Vertol was a helicopter maker, too, and the companies were planning to give the Osprey a power lever that worked like a collective, same as the XV-15’s. To Blot, that was just wrong. He was a fixed-wing guy with a fixed-wing mentality. He saw the Osprey as a fixed-wing aircraft that would take off and land vertically but fly mostly like an airplane, much like the Harrier. The Osprey should have a throttle, not a collective, Blot told the companies, a power lever the pilot moved forward for more thrust and back for less.
Erhart and fellow Bell pilot Dorman Cannon tried to persuade Blot he was wrong. The Osprey might spend less time flying like a helicopter than an airplane, they argued, but the time it spent as a helicopter would be the most critical. That was when you could smack into the ground and die. Osprey pilots were going to need helicopter skills to hover and handle vertical takeoffs and landings, and pilots trained in helicopters were going to be accustomed to a collective. Pilots tend to fall back on old habits in the last few seconds of a flight, especially if anything is going wrong. Those used to a collective might go the wrong way with the power lever if it worked like a throttle, with potentially disastrous results, the helicopter pilots warned.
Philip Dunford, Boeing Vertol’s technology manager on the Osprey in those days, was assigned to brief Blot on why a collective was the way to go. Blot went to Ridley Park one day, listened to Dunford for half an hour, looked at his color slides, and never said a word. When Dunford was done, Blot said, “Well, Phil, I think that was a really good presentation, but it was a waste of time, because we’re having a throttle.”
The companies designed a hybrid control. Like a throttle, you pushed it forward for more power; like a collective, it moved at an angle. Officially, it was the Thrust Control Lever. Unofficially, everybody called it the “Blottle.” Just not to Blot’s face.
* * *
For a while after Blot took over, the Osprey program looked like it was picking up steam. In June 1986, Lehman announced that the Navy wouldn’t buy just 80 for search-and-rescue missions but also another 300 to replace its S-3 Viking antisubmarine warfare planes, an idea Spivey had been trying to sell the Navy on for years. A month after Lehman’s announcement, Bell began a $3.5 million expansion of its Flight Research Center at Arlington Municipal Airport, between Fort Worth and Dallas, adding 80,000 square feet to the 100,000-square-foot facility, to get ready for assembling Osprey prototypes. By November, Bell and Boeing had selected 131 of 201 major subcontractors. In December, Navair approved the Osprey’s design.
Urged on by Blot, the companies were also making new headway toward selling the tiltrotor as a “national asset.” Bell got the Federal Aviation Administration, the Defense Department, and NASA to do a study of how tiltrotors of all sizes might fit into the U.S. transportation system. The report was written by thirty-four engineers, financial experts, and marketers from Bell and Boeing, including Spivey, under the aegis of a nine-member government steering committee. It predicted that “tiltrotors could capture 1/3 to 2/3 of the high-density, short-haul air travel market.” It also said tiltrotors would be a great way for corporate executives to fly, “clearly superior” as a way to take oil workers to and from offshore drilling platforms, and had potential as a commercial cargo carrier as well. The FAA and the U.S. Department of Transportation also commissioned another study in 1987, by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, on how tiltrotors could be used to carry passengers on regional flights around the New York– New Jersey– Pennsylvania area. In August, FAA administrator Allan McArtor flew the XV-15. Afterward, McArtor made it an FAA priority to “certificate” the tiltrotor as safe for use as a civilian passenger aircraft, a lengthy process. McArtor also established a Civilian Tiltrotor Office in the FAA that gave $1.9 million in grants to six states and Puerto Rico to start planning new landing sites for commercial passenger tiltrotors of the future. On November 18, two House subcommittees held a hearing on civilian uses for tiltrotors, taking testimony on the steps needed to modify the air traffic control and airport systems to accommodate them. Hans Mark testified that the tilt-rotor was an “American success story.”
It wasn’t looking that way on the shop floors in Fort Worth and Ridley Park, where Bell and the newly renamed Boeing Helicopter Company were building the first Osprey prototype. The companies were finding it hard to make all the composite parts in the design, and the Osprey section of the shop floor at Ridley Park, where Boeing also built CH-47 Chinook helicopters, was in chaos. The CH-47 manager had grudgingly given the Osprey team about half the space they needed to build the fuselage. Boeing was having all sorts of trouble making fuse-lage frames and formers out of composites. Bell was struggling to make its composite rotor grip work. The Osprey was still far too heavy, too. Between them, the companies had twenty-eight engineers assigned full-time to do nothing else but look for ways to reduce the aircraft’s weight. Blot and the Marine Corps were pressing Bell-Boeing to get a first prototype built and flying, though, because the political wind was blowing in the wrong direction.
In 1987, Pentagon leaders were looking for ways to cut the defense budget to comply with the Gramm-Rudman Act’s mandatory deficit targets. At the same time, while the tiltrotor as a concept was gaining allies, the Osprey was losing important ones. In April, Lehman resigned as Navy secretary to go make money in the private sector. In June, Commandant Kelley retired. A few months later, the Army decided it had no need for 231 Ospreys after all. It dropped out of the program altogether in February 1988. The same month, the Air Force announced it was reducing the number of Ospreys it would buy from 80 to 55. A month after that, the Navy decided it wasn’t going to need those 300 Ospreys for antisubmarine warfare, which had never officially been added to the program. The Navy was still on the books to take 50 as search-and-rescue aircraft, but within a single month, the number of Ospreys the services were planning to buy had plunged from a potential 1,213 to 657. Those were now expected to cost $30 million each—more than double the original estimated price. Blot, Bell, and Boeing could see that if the Osprey was going to fly, it had better do it soon.
* * *
On January 26, 1988, a sunny day in Texas, a massive “Super Guppy” cargo aircraft owned by NASA landed at Arlington Municipal Airport. Within a few minutes, the nose of the cargo plane opened up like the jaws of a great white shark and the Guppy began to disgorge something big and white and shaped not a little like Moby Dick. The first Osprey fuselage, built in Ridley Park by Boeing Helicopter, had arrived at Bell’s Flight Research Center to be
mated with Bell’s wing, nacelles, rotors, and tail.
“Boeing Helicopter Company has completed the assembly of the fuselage for the first V-22 Osprey Flight Test Aircraft,” a Bell-Boeing news release dated December 3, 1987, had said. “The first flight of this revolutionary new tilt-rotor aircraft is scheduled for June 1988.” The fuselage wasn’t really complete, though, and the Osprey wasn’t going to fly that soon. A lot of parts in the fuselage weren’t fitting together properly because new computer programs the engineers used to design it weren’t accurate enough. Boeing had to use thousands of shims—extra pieces of graphite epoxy or metal—to fill in gaps where sections of the fuselage hadn’t been made to just the right size. Major electrical and mechanical systems had yet to be installed. So much work remained to be done that Boeing sent about twenty-five engineers, mechanics, electricians, material handlers, and other “touch labor” workers to Arlington to finish the job. They moved into apartments and started working twelve to fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, to get the fuselage ready to fly.
Most of the Boeing workers were rough-cut Yankees, steak-and-cheese kind of guys who called their hometown “Philly,” loved the Philadelphia Eagles football team, hated the Dallas Cowboys, and had a hard time getting used to the slow-talking, slow-moving Texans at Bell. After they’d been in Arlington a few weeks, though, some started getting into the local cowboy culture. Jim Curren, a sheet metal worker, got a kick out of seeing other guys from Philly show up to go out for a beer at night wearing cowboy boots, Stetson hats, and belt buckles the size of satellite dishes. Even Tony Stecyk, a burly mechanic and flight test technician who favored the biker look—mustache, goatee, and a Harley-Davidson T-shirt—bought cowboy boots, a belt buckle, and a cowboy hat. One night Bell hosted a “hoedown” for its and Boeing’s test teams. The venue was Billy Bob’s, a famed cowboy nightclub in Fort Worth’s touristy Stockyards district housed in a building big enough to hold a bull riding ring. There was a contest to judge which Boeing Yankees were wearing western clothing authentic enough to pass for Texans. Stecyk and his wife, Michelle, both in cowboy boots, cowboy hats, western shirts, and jeans, won it.
The Dream Machine Page 21
