Cowboy culture didn’t appeal to others in the crew from Philadelphia. Joe Lombardo, who supervised the test technicians Boeing had sent, was short, gruff, and foul-mouthed, a real South Philly kind of guy. He wasn’t into the Wild West. That night at Billy Bob’s, though, the other Boeing guys razzed Lombardo into going up against a quick-draw “gunslinger” who was part of the entertainment. Lombardo walked out onto the floor, strapped on a six-shooter loaded with blanks, then told the gunfighter: “Okay, let’s do this on the count of three. One! Two!”—then drew and fired. The gunfighter fell, playing along. “That’s the way we do it in South Philly,” Lombardo sneered at the Bell contingent.
The Texans gave each other wry smiles. You really couldn’t trust these Boeing guys, could you?
* * *
The Osprey was still months away from being ready to fly that spring, but the wing and fuselage had been mated, and the Marines were eager to show progress. Bell and Boeing were, too, so on May 23, they staged a “rollout” of Aircraft 1, a public unveiling. They hired Hollywood producers and New York set designers and scriptwriters to stage the event. They invited fifty generals and admirals, eight congressmen and senators from Texas and Pennsylvania, local and national reporters, and hundreds of other guests—more than two thousand in all.
The event began with receptions the night before at various locations in Fort Worth. The next day, everyone gathered at Bell’s Plant 6 in Arlington inside a hangar whose interior was draped with black curtains. A baritone-voiced announcer introduced top Bell and Boeing executives and VIP guests, including House Speaker Jim Wright, who was also the local Fort Worth congressman, and General Alfred M. Gray, Jr., Kelley’s successor as commandant. A military honor guard paraded the colors as a Marine band played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” A video of the tilt-rotor’s history, The Dream, played on a big screen. “The V-22 Osprey represents the latest success in the persistent path toward achieving the full range of flight,” a narrator read over clips of the XV-3, Boeing’s early attempt at a tilt-wing aircraft, and the XV-15 flying. “But the potential is not yet fulfilled. Military and civil applications abound, both here in the United States and overseas. Future uses of the tiltrotor are limited only by our imagination.” Speeches followed. Gray told the audience the Osprey was “urgently needed” by the Marines, who were eager to put it into service in the 1990s. “This program remains our number-one aviation priority,” he added. When the speeches were done, the band played a fanfare and the announcer boomed: “Ladies and gentlemen, the Naval Air Systems Command, the United States Marine Corps, the Bell-Boeing tiltrotor team, its hundreds of suppliers, and Allison Gas Turbine Division of General Motors proudly present to you—and to the world— the aircraft that will take flight to a new dimension. The V-22 Osprey!” The lights grew dim, a new fanfare played, and the black curtains on the stage parted to reveal the Osprey, bathed in a dreamlike haze of dry-ice fog and lit by beams of red light. Oohs and aahs.
The Osprey looked ready for combat. It was painted in green and gray Marine Corps camouflage and its nacelles stood straight up, as if the big bird were flexing its muscles. Soon the crowd of several hundred filtered outside to wait as workers hitched a small tow tractor to the Osprey’s front landing gear and pulled it out into the sunlight. Once on the tarmac, the Osprey’s rear ramp slowly opened to the ground and VIPs were invited to walk up into the cabin. House Speaker Wright went forward into the cockpit, sat in the right-hand pilot’s seat, stuck his head out the side window, flashed a toothy smile, and raised one hand in a V-for-victory sign. As Gray exited down the back ramp after his tour, someone asked what he thought. “Great aircraft,” Gray grunted. “Super future.”
After the crowd left, workers hosed off the camouflage paint, which was watercolor. Underneath was the white paint Navair required for prototypes. In the Texas heat and humidity, the camouflage had started peeling in places during the rollout. Bell and Boeing flacks were relieved that no one had seemed to notice that, or the fact that some gaps in the fuselage panels were covered with duct tape and painted over. Nor did anyone seem to notice that the Osprey’s rear ramp only opened and closed because mechanic Marty LeCloux was in the back cabin, discreetly pulling levers on a portable hydraulic power unit to make it work. LeCloux felt like a puppeteer putting on a show.
“There was a lot of smoke and mirrors with the rollout,” Jim Curren told me two decades later, when the former sheet metal worker had risen to a management job at Ridley Park. “We had to function the ramp and the lights and everything else to make it look like we were real close to that first flight. It wasn’t ready.”
* * *
Nine months after the rollout, on February 22, 1989, Phil Dunford and some other Boeing and Bell engineers left Navair’s offices in the Washington suburb of Crystal City in a buoyant mood. The past year had been nerve-racking for those trying to get the Osprey flying. All sorts of problems, especially the difficulty of making trustworthy rotor grips out of composites, had busted the first-flight target date again and again. Program manager Blot, who in April had been promoted to brigadier general, had been putting a good face on things publicly. In a September 1988 interview with Aviation Week, he conceded that the Osprey was behind schedule but said, “So far, technically, this program’s been a dream.” Behind the scenes, though, the engineers had been suffering nightmares. Blot and their corporate bosses were putting intense pressure on them to get the Osprey airborne, and the corporate executives were more worried than even Blot knew. In 1988, Bell and Boeing could see they were going to overrun their $1.8 billion FSD contract badly, and under the fixed-price terms, there was no end to the red ink in sight. Lehman’s theory that a fixed price would let the companies resist Navair demands for changes in the design wasn’t panning out. Navair kept insisting on changes and the companies felt they had to go along to stay on good terms with The Customer. “All these fine words of, ‘Oh, you can be the policeman’—the contractor can’t do that role,” Webb Joiner, Bell’s vice president for finance at the time and later its president, told me. “Can you really go to your customer and say, ‘Hey, I know you’re the guy who’s going to make all the decisions, I know you’re the guy who’s going to decide whether to continue this program, but I’m going to tell you what you can and can’t do’? The reality of the thing is, that’d be about like somebody working for a company going in to the president and telling him what he’s going to do. You just can’t do that.”
As the year went on, the sums in monthly reports on the overruns kept growing. Textron’s executives were angry about them. Boeing was causing most of the overruns, but under their 50–50 partnership, Textron subsidiary Bell was having to foot half the bill. Not long after the Osprey rollout in May, the companies held a meeting where Bell contracts director Dan McCrary and others reported that by the time FSD was over, Bell-Boeing’s combined losses might reach $300 million. At monthly meetings, Textron’s chief operating officer, William A. Anders, and Boeing executive Alford argued violently about who was to blame. Anders, a wiry 1955 U.S. Naval Academy graduate with the self-assurance of the former astronaut he was, would explode at Alford, a corpulent, old-school defense contractor who had begun his career as a test pilot. They would get red in the face, pound the table, shout at each other in ways that made others in the room cringe. Joiner liked to joke that the Anders-versus-Alford bouts were so regular and exciting, maybe Bell and Boeing could cover their cost overruns by selling tickets to their meetings.
As Dunford and the other engineers left their meeting at Navair in February 1989, though, they were blissfully ignorant of those corporate clashes. To the engineers, things were looking up. They had decided the Osprey was finally ready for its first flight, and Navair had agreed. To mark the milestone, the engineers went to Washington’s trendy Georgetown neighborhood for dinner at an Italian restaurant called the Mondo Cucina. There, after a few drinks, they divided themselves into two factions, the “Wizards” and the “Turtles,” and made a com
plicated wager. The losers would treat the winners to dinner at one of three restaurants on a sliding scale of elegance, depending on how close the Wizards came to predicting the power needed to hover the Osprey on its first flight. The next day, one of them drew up the terms in an elaborate document labeled “The Mondo Cucina Accords.” To the engineers, the Osprey’s future looked bright.
On March 19, a cloudy Sunday in Arlington, Texas, test pilots Dorman Cannon of Bell and Dick Balzer of Boeing climbed into the first Osprey prototype, painted white with red and blue markings and wired with strain gauges all over. The Osprey was loaded with monitoring instruments to detect vibration and stress throughout the aircraft and radio data to a telemetry room in a hangar so engineers there could warn the pilots if something bad was about to happen. The aircraft’s total weight was 39,450 pounds, well above Navair’s empty weight spec of 31,886, and that was with some nonessential parts left off. No media had been invited, only a couple of dozen Bell and Boeing employees. No reason to have a lot of people watching if the Osprey didn’t end up flying, or worse.
Soon Cannon taxied the Osprey to the north end of the runway, its rotors thrumming in a distinctive, throaty roar. At 10:56 a.m. Central Standard Time, he pushed the Blottle forward and the Osprey lumbered two or three feet into the air. The downdraft from the rotors with their high disk loading started kicking up dirt and rocks and asphalt, pelting the fuselage and windshield. Cannon gave it more power to get up and out of the debris storm, but a little more than he’d intended. The Osprey hopped up to about 40 feet. Cannon kept it in a hover there. The controls were a little more sensitive than he had expected, but the Osprey handled just as it had in the computerized simulator he and Balzer had used to train for the flight. As they hovered, Cannon used the foot pedals to make some rudder turns, then gingerly tilted the rotors a bit forward to see if the thrust would go where he expected. It did. The Osprey started moving over the runway at about 20 knots. Cannon put the rotors back to 90 degrees and held the Osprey in a hover for ten or twelve minutes. He liked the way the big tiltrotor was responding to the computerized flight controls, but he was a little surprised by the force of the downdraft from its rotors. The turbulence was curling up the edges of the asphalt runway below and throwing up a lot of gravel. Cannon said to Balzer, “Hey, Dick, let’s just land this thing and taxi it back.” They did. They took it up briefly again later, but that was the Osprey’s first flight.
To Cannon, after so many hours in the simulator, it seemed anticlimactic.
To engineer Phil Dunford and the other “Wizards,” it was a happy but costly moment. They had underestimated how much power it would take to hover the Osprey. The four Wizards had to take the Turtles, the test pilots, and their wives to a chic French restaurant, where the bill for the steak, duck, and fine wines the winners ordered was steep.
To Spivey, watching the Osprey’s first flight was like witnessing the birth of a baby. Like disillusioned tiltrotor engineer Ken Wernicke, Spivey thought the Osprey ugly, a clumsy-looking thing. When he saw it fly, though, his heart soared. He felt a warm glow, just like a new father.
CHAPTER SEVEN
ONE PERIOD OF DARKNESS
One day on Capitol Hill, Democratic representative Charles Wilson arrived early for a meeting of the Texas delegation to Congress. Republican senator John Tower of Texas was already there, waiting for the session to start.
“Dang, John,” drawled Wilson. “That’s a beautiful suit. Where’d you get it?”
“Got this suit on Savile Row in London. Cost six hundred dollars,” Tower sniffed.
“Gawdam!” Wilson replied. “What would it cost in a man’s size?!”
That story—probably apocryphal but possibly true—was a favorite among those who followed the Texas delegation to Congress in the 1980s. Charlie Wilson, well over six feet tall, was a caricaturist’s conception of a Texan: big, brash, raw as a barrel of West Texas Intermediate crude, seductive to women, seduced by booze. Wilson was a cheeky rogue, apt to blurt out whatever outrageous observation came to mind. Tom Hanks portrayed him faithfully, if charitably, in the 2007 film Charlie Wilson’s War. The movie, based on former CBS-TV producer George Crile’s book by the same name, recounted Wilson’s oxymoronically public 1980s crusade to make the CIA “covertly” funnel arms to Islamic rebels fighting the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan.
John Goodwin Tower, who stood five foot five, was a Methodist minister’s son born in Houston, but he looked as if he might have stepped out of a novel by British humorist P. G. Wodehouse or satirist Evelyn Waugh. A Navy enlisted man during World War II, Tower earned bach-elor’s and master’s degrees at Southern Methodist University in Dallas after the war, then spent a year at the London School of Economics. The rest of his life, he affected the dress and style of an English gentleman between the world wars: tailored three-piece suits with handkerchief in left breast pocket; starched shirts with French cuffs; English-blend cigarettes plucked from a silver case and lit with a silver lighter. John Tower, who served in the Senate from 1961 to 1985, exuded self-importance the way Charlie Wilson oozed self-indulgence. Wilson and Tower, though, also shared at least a couple of attributes. Both were fond of pretty women and strong drink.
Tower’s thirst was why Dick Spivey got home about two-thirty one morning shortly before Christmas 1988. Spivey had joined Bell Helicopter president Jack Horner and a couple of other colleagues that evening at a Fort Worth hotel to hear a speech by former senator Tower, now President-elect George H. W. Bush’s rumored nominee for defense secretary. The idea of Tower running the Pentagon cheered those at Bell. Tower had seen the XV-15 fly at the 1981 Paris Air Show and had been a tiltrotor supporter ever since. As chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee during his last term in Congress, Tower had helped get the Osprey program started. Since leaving the Senate, Tower had been a U.S. arms control negotiator and run a commission for President Reagan that investigated the Iran-Contra affair. Since May 1988, he had been a $10,000-a-month consultant to Bell Helicopter parent Textron on the Osprey program. The new Bush administration was going to have to cut defense spending to live up to the president-elect’s famous campaign pledge of “no new taxes,” that was clear. With Tower atop the Pentagon, however, the Osprey figured to be safe.
After Tower gave his speech that evening in Fort Worth, he wanted a drink, so Horner, Spivey, and the others from Bell joined him for cocktails in the lobby of the Hyatt Regency, formerly the Hotel Texas, where President John F. Kennedy had spent the last night of his life twenty-five years earlier. The group drank and talked until 2 a.m., mostly about the Osprey. Spivey told Tower about all the steps the engineers were taking to try to get the Osprey’s weight down. When he left to go home, Spivey was feeling good, not just from the drinks, but about the Osprey’s future once the Senate confirmed Tower as defense secretary.
The Senate didn’t. Tower’s confirmation hearings turned into a soap opera the day they began, on January 31, 1989. Paul Weyrich, a conservative activist scandalized by what he viewed as Tower’s turpitude, told the Senate Armed Services Committee there was truth in rumors that the nominee was a womanizer and an alcohol abuser, allegations raised by Tower’s second wife during a nasty 1987 divorce. Weyrich himself had seen Tower “in a condition—lack of sobriety—as well as with women to whom he was not married,” Weyrich testified.
The FBI had investigated such allegations before Bush nominated Tower, and Tower denied he had a drinking problem. But some members of the Armed Services Committee said they needed to be sure the defense secretary would have “clarity of thought at all times,” as Senator Sam Nunn, the Georgia Democrat who chaired the panel, put it. Other committee members questioned whether Tower was too cozy with the defense industry. Textron was only one of half a dozen defense contractors who had paid Tower a combined $763,777 in consulting fees since he had left the Senate. Tower promised to go on the wagon if confirmed and take no part in decisions affecting his former clients, but his sharp partisans
hip and proud manner had alienated too many colleagues over the years, it seemed, especially Democrats. On March 9, the Senate rejected his nomination 53–47, with one of its 45 Republicans and all but three of its 55 Democrats voting against him. Spivey and others at Bell were disappointed.
Four days later, President Bush named the second-ranking Republican leader in the House, Wyoming representative Dick Cheney, to replace Tower. After a cheery one-day hearing before a relieved Armed Services Committee, the Senate confirmed Cheney 92–0 on March 17, two days before the Osprey’s first flight.
Cheney made two things clear at his confirmation hearing. First, as President Bush had promised when he sent his first budget to Congress in February, the new administration was going to increase defense spending just enough to keep up with inflation. Fighting the massive deficits left over from the Reagan years was issue number one in Washington in 1989. Under the Gramm-Rudman budget-balancing law, Congress and Bush were going to have to hold the deficit for the next fiscal year to $100 billion.
Cheney’s second major point was that he believed in executive power, as he would prove beyond a doubt during his two terms as vice president from 2001 to 2009. Though he had served ten years in the House, Cheney had begun his political rise in the 1970s as Donald Rumsfeld’s deputy when that future defense secretary was counselor in the Nixon White House. Cheney thought the balance of power in Washington had swung too far toward the legislative branch since President Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974 amid the Watergate scandals; the pendulum needed to swing back toward the executive branch, especially in defense and foreign policy. At his hearing, Cheney declared that “sometimes having a confrontation with the Congress is the right way to go.”
The Dream Machine Page 22
