The mistakes didn’t end there, investigators found. Five days before Aircraft 5’s crash, Bell found one miswired vyro on the first Osprey prototype, Aircraft 1. The day before the crash, a Bell flight control engineer told a Boeing flight control engineer about the discovery. The next day— the day of the crash—another Bell engineer sent an e-mail to colleagues suggesting all vyros in the prototypes be checked. At 4 P.M., two hours before Wilson and Freisner lifted off, a third Bell engineer who had read the e-mail called a Boeing engineer to suggest checking the vyros in the Osprey prototypes at Wilmington, Aircraft 2, Aircraft 4, and Aircraft 5. “The engineers involved in the conversation did not believe that there was an ‘immediate flight safety risk,’ ” the crash report said, and after the phone call, the Boeing engineer simply went home. “Basically it was the end of the day and he took no further action.”
* * *
The loss of Aircraft 5 had no discernible effect in Congress. The idea that new aircraft sometimes crash in testing wasn’t hard to grasp, and the investigation dispelled any suspicions that the accident was caused by some inherent aerodynamic defect in the tiltrotor. Besides, on the Osprey issue, the Marines already had taken the Hill. By 1991, Congress was firmly on the Corps’ side.
The lobbying campaign Representative Curt Weldon had devised and his military-industrial complex allies had implemented was working well. Briefings and trips to the Bell and Boeing factories, organized by the companies and often escorted by Marine Corps legislative liaison officers, had educated many members of Congress and key aides on the issue. Campaign donations and payments of up to two thousand dollars for taking the time to drop by a factory or listen to a briefing—so-called “honorariums,” then legal but since banned—helped get the attention of some. The XV-15’s flight at the Capitol had given many in Congress a vivid idea of what a tiltrotor was and stirred imaginations. Even members of Congress uninterested in defense issues were now intrigued by the tiltrotor’s civil potential. The Institute for Defense Analyses study, meanwhile, had blunted David Chu’s argument that the Osprey wasn’t worth the extra money for the Marines. All in all, the Osprey camp had defined the issue on its own terms: a technological revolution that would help the Marines win wars with fewer casualties, solve civilian aviation’s biggest problems, and bring billions of dollars into the economy from overseas was going down the drain because Dick Cheney had listened to a Pentagon pencil pusher who saw the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
The Osprey camp’s grassroots machinery was also in place and well oiled. The Osprey didn’t usually face a floor vote in the House or Senate, but when it landed on a committee agenda, Capitol Hill phones would ring like church bells at a coronation and congressional mailbags would overflow with pleas and demands from union members, Bell-Boeing subcontractors, and retired Marines to fund the tiltrotor. At Weldon’s urging, the United Auto Workers even put support for the Osprey on their congressional “scorecard,” a device interest groups use to rate law-makers. Most Democrats try to score 100 percent on labor union scorecards; most Republicans try to score 100 percent on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce scorecard. The first thing many members do when they walk onto the floor of the House or Senate to vote is to find out whether the issue is on the scorecard of an interest group whose endorsements and campaign contributions they want when they run for reelection. Any member who wanted a rating of 100 percent from the UAW in those days had to vote for the Osprey. Texas congressman Pete Geren thought that was one of Weldon’s cleverest moves. Now even liberal Democrats who reflexively voted against defense spending were backing the Osprey to please Big Labor.
All those things helped. What was keeping the Osprey alive politically, though, was the Marine Corps’ zeal for the tiltrotor and its clout in Congress. Commandant Al Gray had played nice when testifying to Congress in 1989, saying he supported Cheney’s decision to kill the Osprey but the secretary had gotten bad advice. Two years later, now sure of the Osprey’s political support and headed toward retirement that summer, Gray told the Senate Armed Services Committee it would be “criminal” to delay any longer. The Marines “felt like the V-22 was the key to their continued relevance,” Geren told me in 2007, when he was secretary of the Army. The tiltrotor was going to be a way to “take their conventional Marine mission and put it on steroids, allow them to stay relevant in a world of stand-off warfare and be able to self-deploy around the world.” Geren remembered Gray saying once that the Marines wanted the Osprey “more than they want to go to heaven.” Their alumni and friends in Congress were eager to help. Each year, Cheney would leave the Osprey out of his budget; each year, Marine Corps and Osprey allies on key congressional committees would put it back in.
Dick Cheney understood Congress. He’d served there ten years, been one of the top Republican leaders in the House, and he could see early on that he wasn’t going to get his way on the Osprey by winning votes. After 1989, Cheney conceded that with so much money already spent, it made sense to finish Full Scale Development of the Osprey and see whether the aircraft worked. Adamant as the Marines were that they needed the Osprey, though, Cheney was just as adamant that the Pentagon couldn’t afford it, and he was determined to make his decision stick. He would go along with the Osprey as a science project: prototypes could be tested, then put on the shelf. Where Cheney drew the line was at buying tools and parts to produce Ospreys for the military, and behind that line lay a strategy. If Cheney could keep the Osprey in FSD, at some point Bell and Boeing might be forced to give up just to keep from pouring more of their own money into the project under their fixed-price contract. If he could stall it long enough, the Marines might get desperate enough to replace their CH-46 Sea Knights with helicopters instead of waiting for the Osprey. In 1989, Cheney refused to spend $200 million Congress had provided to start Osprey production before he took over the Pentagon. In 1990, he refused to spend another $165 million Congress provided for the same purpose. Cheney’s strategy was to starve the Osprey to death.
By 1991, the Marines were ravenous. A Navy study a decade earlier had said this was the year the Marines’ fleet of CH-46s would be so degraded by age and losses they would have too few to mount a major amphibious assault. This was the year the Marines had counted on getting the Osprey when they’d embarked on the project in 1982 on Navy Secretary John Lehman’s orders. In the mid-1980s, with the Osprey hatched but taking longer to fly than expected, the Marines had spent enough on the CH-46 to keep it flying, but by 1991, wear and tear and crashes had pared the fleet to a mere 234. Just over a third of the “Phrogs” the Marines had bought were still flying, and for safety’s sake, there were limits on them. In combat, the Sea Knight was supposed to carry eighteen troops and do evasive maneuvers; in training, the Marines no longer dared put more than nine troops inside, and extreme maneuvers were barred. Bowing to necessity after Cheney’s decision to cancel the Osprey, the Marine Corps had created a new program to replace their CH-46s, opening the door to the possibility of accepting a modern troop transport helicopter if they couldn’t get the tiltrotor. The Marines didn’t want a new helicopter instead of the Osprey, but if they couldn’t get some kind of new troop carrier by 1996, on paper they might be unable to launch a major amphibious assault anymore. Unthinkable. Within their cult of warriors, it was an article of faith that amphibious assault was the reason America had a Marine Corps. If they lost the ability to do that mission, they just might lose the Corps.
Inside The Building, and publicly, in 1991, the Marines were keeping their options open. On the Hill, and behind closed doors, they were getting more aggressive.
One day that autumn, Marine Colonel Parker Miller, a legislative liaison officer whose job was to monitor Marine Corps programs in the House, was in Curt Weldon’s office with the congressman and Textron lobbyist Mary Howell. A purer example of the “Iron Triangle”—the inbred alliance of industrial, military, and political interests that under-girds defense procurement—would be hard to find. Miller and Howell
were advising Weldon as he negotiated the final form of legislation aimed at forcing Cheney to give up.
Shortly after General Carl E. Mundy, Jr., succeeded Gray as commandant in July 1991, Mundy asked Colonel Jim Schaefer, the Osprey program manager, what it would take to get the tiltrotor ready for production and in service by 1996. A lot, Schaefer told him. The Osprey camp had been trying for two years to make Cheney spend money to start production. In February, after Cheney refused for the second year running, Dick Spivey told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram he wasn’t sure how much longer Textron and Boeing stockholders would wait to start recovering the money the companies had put into the Osprey. “Clearly, we are ready for production,” Spivey said. Schaefer knew the aircraft was far from it. Despite all the work over the past eight years, the design still wasn’t right, and the prototypes couldn’t meet the Osprey’s performance requirements.
The wing stow mechanism—the stainless steel “bed frame” device designed by Boeing engineer Kenneth Grina—was too heavy, too costly, and too slow. The Osprey was supposed to fold its rotor blades and stow its wing along the fuselage, or unstow the wing and unfold the blades, in no more than ninety seconds. Aboard the USS Wasp that past December, those tasks had taken at least 107 seconds every time. The mechanism also tended to bind, stopping the wing midway through stowing at times. Lots of other things were wrong. Bell was still having trouble making composite rotor grips. The Allison engines burned too much fuel. Boeing’s fuselage was too “draggy”—it created about 15 percent more wind resistance than Bell-Boeing’s contract allowed. The Osprey was still about 3,000 pounds overweight, too, so to lift the required pay-load, it had to carry less fuel. Combined with its thirsty engines and draggy aerodynamics, that meant it couldn’t meet its requirement to fly 2,100 nautical miles without refueling. Its estimated maximum range of 1,750 nautical miles was nearly 400 miles short. The extra weight also meant the engines and transmissions needed beefing up. Boeing had used gobs of metal rivets and fasteners to hold its composite fuse-lage together, though, in theory, one reason for using composites was to eliminate as many rivets and fasteners as possible. Excessive vibration in the prototypes had bothered pilots and caused rivets to fail. The flight control software needed a lot of revision. The “environmental control system”—air-conditioning and heat—sometimes roasted the pilots and sometimes spit little balls of ice at them. Test pilots found the computerized flight plan software a “horror show,” as one put it in a report. Mechanics found it difficult to work on hydraulic lines and other parts inside the tightly packed nacelles, or even inspect them. The Osprey needed a makeover.
The only way to get the Osprey ready for production by 1996, Schaefer told Mundy, would be to build some new, improved prototypes and test them. For that to happen, though, Congress would have to provide enough money—and make Cheney spend it. Mundy told Schaefer to put together a plan. Schaefer did, then explained his plan to liaison officer Miller, who didn’t have to ask what the commandant wanted done. Miller drafted legislation embodying Schaefer’s plan and got the draft into the right hands.
That May, Weldon got the revised Osprey program into the annual defense authorization bill; Pennsylvania Democrat John Murtha, chairman of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee and a Marine Corps veteran, put it into the defense appropriations bill. Most important, to make sure Cheney would have to carry it out, the details of the program were written into the appropriations bill itself, an unusual twist. By custom, Congress lumps appropriations for defense programs into large accounts—“Aircraft Procurement, Navy,” in the Osprey’s case. A conference report accompanying the bill specifies how much Congress intends the Pentagon to spend on each individual program. Earlier that year, Cheney had shown he wasn’t going to be bound by custom when it came to the Osprey. In 1990, Congress had put $165 million for Osprey production into the defense appropriations bill. Cheney simply refused to spend it, treating the bill’s conference report instructions as a mere suggestion. The Osprey camp wanted to prevent him from doing that again by writing the new plan into law.
As Miller and Howell sat in Weldon’s office that autumn day, Weldon was trying to make sure his House colleagues in the appropriations bill conference with the Senate didn’t agree to water down the House bill’s firm instructions to Cheney on the Osprey. Cheney’s point man on the issue, Pentagon comptroller Sean O’Keefe, was pressing the conference to do just that. By phone and in person, O’Keefe was negotiating with Murtha and other “appropriators,” as members of the House and Senate appropriations committees are often called. Appropriators were calling Weldon that day to discuss O’Keefe’s proposals. Weldon would ask Miller and Howell what they thought of O’Keefe’s latest, then call the appropriators back with counterproposals. As Weldon talked on the phone, a secretary came in to tell Miller he had a call on another line. It was an officer at Headquarters Marine Corps.
“Get out,” the officer told Miller. “Whatever you’re doing over there, stop it. O’Keefe’s got your name.”
Miller never found out if O’Keefe really knew he was in Weldon’s office helping the congressman negotiate legislation. To Miller’s relief, he never heard anything more about it, either, and the House held its ground in the appropriations conference. The final bill included $790 million to start building three “production representative” Ospreys— improved prototypes able to meet all speed, range, payload, and other requirements—by December 31, 1996. The bill said the new prototypes must be built “to the extent practicable” on tooling that could be used for production models. It also gave the Defense Department sixty days to send Congress a plan for carrying out the new program. Weldon and others in the Osprey camp couldn’t wait to see what Cheney and O’Keefe would do next.
It didn’t take long to find out. On January 26, 1992—the deadline in the law for submitting a plan—O’Keefe sent a letter to the House and Senate saying the Pentagon couldn’t start the new program for several reasons. First, the Navy Department needed to study what work Bell-Boeing had left to do under their fixed-price FSD contract. Beyond that, O’Keefe said, “The Navy believes that the aircraft requires substantial redesign and test to meet the Joint Service Operational Requirements.” Finally, he added, a second development phase might cost $2.5 billion, and Congress hadn’t provided that much.
Weldon was steamed. He saw O’Keefe’s letter as pure gamesman-ship, a bunch of bureaucratic excuses to hide the fact that O’Keefe and Cheney were planning to defy the will of Congress yet again. Now, though, rather than fight head-on, they were trying to strangle the Osprey to death with the jungly tangle of rules, reviews, and regulations known as the “defense acquisition process.” If that was the way they wanted to play, Weldon decided, he would, too. Confrontation got Weldon’s adrenaline flowing.
* * *
On a hot afternoon in the summer of 1990, Dick Spivey was asked to go to the conference room at Bell Helicopter’s Plant 6 in Arlington, Texas, to do a briefing on the Osprey and the tiltrotor’s promise for a special guest. Ann Richards, silver-haired and sharp-tongued, had won the Democratic nomination for governor that spring after two terms as state treasurer. Spivey was excited to meet her. Richards had become a political celebrity two years earlier at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta. In a prime-time speech, she poured a liberal dose of her acid wit on Republican presidential candidate George H. W. Bush, a Texan for decades but born into wealth in Connecticut. As vice president for the past eight years, Richards said, “George Bush hasn’t displayed the slightest interest in anything we care about. And now that he’s after a job that he can’t get appointed to, he’s like Columbus discovering America. He’s found child care. He’s found education. Poor George. He can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.” Richards gave the military-industrial complex a dose, too. “We Democrats are committed to a strong America, and, quite frankly, when our leaders say to us, ‘We need a new weapons system,’ our inclination is to say, ‘Well, t
hey must be right.’ But when we pay billions for planes that won’t fly, billions for tanks that won’t fire, and billions for systems that won’t work, ‘that old dog won’t hunt.’ ”
Spivey figured Richards might be a tough audience for a marketer like him selling a defense program like the Osprey. Instead, exhausted from campaigning, she proved a tired one. Spivey used slides to make his usual pitch: the tiltrotor could fly faster and farther than a helicopter; the disaster at Desert One might have been averted if the tiltrotor had been available; the Osprey was the Marine Corps’ number-one aviation priority; the tiltrotor was a national asset; it could mean thousands of jobs and billions of dollars to the Texas economy. At first, Richards asked a lot of questions. Then she asked fewer. Then her eyelids began to droop. At times, Spivey was sure she was dozing. She would perk up and ask another question now and then, but when the two-hour briefing ended, Spivey wasn’t sure how much she’d absorbed.
Richards won her election that fall, and a few months after she became governor, Spivey decided she must have taken in a lot of what he’d told her. In May 1991, Richards and several other top Texas officials Spivey had briefed at one time or another—the Democratic lieutenant governor, the Democratic Speaker of the Texas House, the new Republican state treasurer—publicly urged President Bush to build the Osprey. The tiltrotor, they said, was too important to sacrifice to post- Cold War pressure to cut defense spending. “It just seems to me so obvious that we need to build this airplane,” Richards said.
A few months later, the 1992 presidential election campaign was well under way, and on March 5, ABC-TV hosted a debate in Dallas among the four remaining Democratic candidates. Spivey nearly jumped out of his chair when one them, Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, criticized Bush and Cheney for trying to cancel the Osprey, which Harkin noted was built in Fort Worth. “We could build 12 vertical ports in our biggest cities on the East Coast, 12 of those, [and] buy 165 of these aircraft for the price of one-half a new large airport,” Harkin said. “These are aircraft we can build commercially, sell here, sell around the world, yet Bush is cutting the funds for that, putting the money in the B-2 bomber. It makes no sense.” A moment later, Arkansas governor Bill Clinton chimed in. “I support the V-22,” Clinton said. Spivey went to bed happy that night. Maybe that would get Bush’s attention, he mused, even lead the White House to put some pressure on Cheney to back down on the Osprey.
The Dream Machine Page 27
