Spivey had been frustrated with the one shot he’d gotten at doing that. A few months earlier, after a lot of phone calls, Textron’s chief Washington lobbyist, Mary Howell, had gotten Spivey in to brief the White House chief of staff, former New Hampshire governor John Sununu. Spivey had flown up from Fort Worth, nervous but ready, and thrilled to get his first-ever visit to the White House. Howell and Textron consultant Charles R. Black, Jr., a prominent Washington lobbyist and Republican political operative, went with him. Sununu had a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from MIT and a reputation for arrogance Spivey now experienced firsthand. Spivey had brought illustrations, charts, graphs, and other material along in a big book. He wanted to sit next to Sununu and show it to him. When the group reached an ornate room in the White House, though, Spivey was ushered to a sofa while Sununu took a chair across a coffee table from him. Spivey still tried to use his briefing book, but it hardly mattered. Sununu barely glanced at the book, and showed no interest when Spivey touted the tiltrotor’s potential as a regional aircraft that could fly, say, from downtown Washington to Manhattan. “Got it,” Sununu would grunt occasionally. “Okay.” Then he launched into a monologue about how hard it was to arrange for the president of the United States to land by helicopter in New York City. “How are you going to get this thing to land there every hour?” Sununu scoffed. Spivey left thinking Sununu was one of the most pompous men he’d ever met. Getting the White House to overrule Cheney clearly wasn’t in the cards.
Curt Weldon had reached the same conclusion, and it worried the Republican congressman. Despite his fight with Cheney on the Osprey, Weldon was loyal to the administration and wanted to see Bush reelected. Weldon thought his home state of Pennsylvania, with its twenty-three electoral votes, could be pivotal on election day, and he was sure Cheney’s opposition to the Osprey was going to cost Bush there. Weldon had been trying to get that message to Bush for a long time. The president, though, was clearly leaving the issue to Cheney, and Cheney wasn’t budging.
On April 2, 1992, Cheney sent Congress a letter saying that though the fiscal 1992 appropriations act required it, he didn’t intend to build the new Osprey prototypes. The program Congress had approved “is not affordable within the overall constraints we face on defense resources,” Cheney wrote.
Now, Weldon was sure, Cheney had overplayed his hand. Even members of Congress with no interest at all in the Osprey would get their backs up at the idea of the defense secretary simply refusing to carry out a law.
Weldon was right. Soon others in the Osprey camp were getting representatives and senators to sign a letter to Bush denouncing Cheney and calling his latest move the equivalent of a line-item veto by an “unelected political appointee.” When the House Armed Services Committee marked up the new defense authorization bill a few weeks after Cheney sent his letter, Weldon had no trouble inserting an amendment aimed at sending him a message. Weldon’s amendment provided that Pentagon comptroller Sean O’Keefe’s office budget would be cut 5 percent for every month the Pentagon failed to implement the revised Osprey program. “When the check cutting office won’t cut the check,” Weldon crowed, “it’s time to cut the check cutting office.”
That was mainly for effect, a street fighter’s punch in what had become a street fight. Weldon’s serious move was a legal maneuver. The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 gave the General Accounting Office, a congressional agency later renamed the Government Accountability Office, authority to decide whether executive branch refusals to spend appropriated funds were illegal “impoundments.” If the GAO ruled that a federal agency like the Pentagon had impounded money illegally, that agency had forty-five days to start spending it or else the matter would automatically go to court. Weldon asked the GAO to rule on Cheney’s refusal to spend the money for new Osprey prototypes.
On June 3, 1992, Sean O’Keefe came to Cheney’s office with bad news.
“The GAO has ruled against us,” O’Keefe said. Cheney asked what their next move should be.
“There isn’t one,” O’Keefe replied. “This is it. Game, set, match.” The strategy of using executive power to stall the Osprey had run its course.
Two days after the GAO ruled, Cheney invited Weldon and other Republicans in the Osprey camp to his office. Weldon told Cheney he was “playing into the Democrats’ hands” with his opposition to the Osprey, “creating an embarrassment to the president and yourself.” Cheney mostly listened, and made no promises. “He’s like a sphinx,” Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican, told reporters afterward. “It’s very hard to read him. But I think the pressure is building.”
By now, Bill Clinton had the Democratic presidential nomination sewn up, and Democrats in the Osprey camp were urging him to use the issue against Bush. On June 23, Democrats in the Texas congressional delegation wrote Clinton a letter inviting him to visit Bell Helicopter, see the Osprey fly, maybe even ride in the XV-15. “Bell has assured us that such a visit can be arranged on fairly short notice,” they said.
O’Keefe could see that Cheney didn’t want to give in. Boxed in by the GAO ruling, though, he had to give ground. On July 2, Cheney sent Congress a letter offering a compromise. He would stop trying to kill the Osprey if Congress let him spend $10 million to study a new helicopter as an alternative. He also would “promptly” use the rest of $1.55 billion Congress had authorized for the revised Osprey program in the previous years’ defense bills, though not for production, as the law required. The money would be used instead to work on the Osprey’s weight problem, do more flight tests, and build some new prototypes, though how many would depend on “contract negotiations.” Congress’s plan for “production representative” Ospreys would be dropped, and a final decision on building the tiltrotor for the Marines would be “left for future years.”
Weldon and other Republicans declared victory. Cheney’s request to start work on a new helicopter was nothing more than a face-saving move, Weldon told reporters.
Democrats in the Osprey camp remained suspicious. On the House floor later that month, Democratic representative Martin Frost of Dallas explained their concern: “This whole process may just be a smoke screen by the administration to get past this election.”
* * *
The Marine Corps base at Quantico, Virginia, is a major training facility and home to some of the service’s most important commands. Located only thirty-three miles south of Washington, D.C., Quantico is also a handy showplace for the Marine Corps. The base is close enough that even senior generals and Pentagon officials, members of Congress, and top congressional aides can often squeeze a visit into their busy schedules. Legislative liaison officers frequently escort such VIPs to Quantico to see weaponry, watch field exercises, get a firsthand look at new equipment, maybe shoot a machine gun to see how it feels. Such field trips are one way the Marine Corps builds support for its programs in Congress, and in the spring of 1992, that’s how Colonel Jim Schaefer wanted to use Quantico.
With Cheney and O’Keefe telling Congress the Osprey was far from ready for prime time, Schaefer decided it would be a good time to reassure Marine Corps leaders that their dream machine was becoming a reality. Early that year, the fourth prototype had been flown from Boeing’s flight test center in Delaware to Eglin Air Force Base in Florida for a few months of special testing. On its way back, Schaefer thought, why not have Aircraft 4 stop at Quantico and invite some VIPs to see it? Schaefer got permission from Headquarters Marine Corps, and soon plans were in the works for the commandant and other top generals to be on hand when Aircraft 4 landed. To give the visit an official purpose, a unit of Marine Corps and Air Force pilots formed to help test the Osprey before it went into service were told they could use Aircraft 4 for a few days while it was at Quantico. That wasn’t the point of the visit, though, Schaefer told me years later. “On paper, it was supposed to be familiarization,” Schaefer said. “In fact, what we were trying to do was to show it off. ” Aircraft 4’s scheduled stop
at Quantico would prove fateful.
Aircraft 4 had been sent to Florida for some of the most grueling tests a prototype can undergo. Eglin Air Force Base, which covers 724 square miles of Florida panhandle near the Gulf of Mexico, is home to the McKinley Climatic Laboratory, a complex of test chambers worthy of a James Bond movie. Outside temperatures in the area vary from an average low of 48 degrees Fahrenheit in winter to a high of 88 degrees in summer. Inside the McKinley lab’s vast Main Chamber, which covers more square yards than a football field and has a ceiling seven stories high, technicians control the climate. With powerful steam boilers and huge refrigeration coils, they can mimic the desert or the arctic, raise the temperature to a scorching 125 degrees Fahrenheit or plunge it to minus 65. Using big water pumps and machinery invented for ski resorts, they can re-create many of a flying machine’s worst enemies: driving rain, sleet, snow, pea-soup fog, salt spray—the works. The lab’s solar lamps can bake an aircraft with radiation worse than the Sahara’s. Its special blowers can coat an aircraft in engine-choking dust. No matter what the weather is doing outside, the technicians at the McKinley lab can conjure up almost any climate to see how an aircraft will hold up in it. With the subject tethered like a torture victim to a “run stand”—each aircraft tested gets its own, specially designed—the lab’s technicians can perform their meteorological magic even as an aircraft’s engines roar, its propellers or rotors turn, if it has them, and pilots in the cockpit manipulate its controls to simulate flight. For pilots and any others who join them inside an aircraft tested this way, it’s a you-wouldn’t-believe-it experience, the kind you tell about to wow your grandchildren.
An aircraft being subjected to such controlled abuse needs mechanics to repair it after each session and engineers to monitor the tests and analyze the results. When word got around Boeing that Aircraft 4 was going to Eglin for several months, nearly everyone saw it as a plum assignment, though not for the often painful experience of working in the McKinley lab. Those on the small test team would be put up in beachfront condos on the Emerald Coast, aka “Redneck Riviera,” and could take their families along. They were guaranteed plenty of overtime, which meant they’d get plenty of overtime pay. Four months at a Florida beach resort on the company with extra pay, or a dreary Northeast winter? There were plenty of volunteers.
One was Anthony Stecyk, a mechanic who in 1987–88 had spent most of a year in Texas with the Boeing crew sent there to finish the first Osprey fuselage. Stecyk’s wife, Michelle, had come to Texas, too, and they’d enjoyed the western sojourn. Tony’s passion was restoring and collecting old Harley-Davidson motorcycles, and he had added to his collection in Texas. Another fond memory was how he and Michelle won the Texan-look-alike contest at Billy Bob’s nightclub. Michelle was glad to go along to Florida, too, especially since she and Tony now had a two-year-old son, Little Anthony, as she called him. Two good buddies of Tony’s also would be there, Marines assigned to the Osprey flight test team in Wilmington. Master Gunnery Sergeant Gary Leader and Gunnery Sergeant Sean Joyce were the first Marines to be named Osprey crew chiefs, mechanics whose job is to tend the back cabin and help the pilots avoid hazards during flights. Leader and Joyce shared Stecyk’s love of Harleys, and the Stecyks had entertained the two Marines at their home near Ridley Park, where Tony and Michelle liked to throw big parties on holidays. Michelle had worked in airline catering and could whip up a buffet for thirty or forty friends on special occasions with no sweat. Tony sometimes went on short assignments to Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland, where Leader and Joyce were based, and the three of them would ride Harleys together when he was there.
At forty, Leader was eight years older than Joyce and treated him like a kid brother, though in fact they were brothers-in-law. Leader had introduced Joyce to his sister, Yvonne, and the two had married. Leader and Joyce, the Stecyks, and a couple of other Boeing mechanics and their wives were a tight little circle. In Florida that winter, they convened on Friday evenings at the Enclave, the condominium complex where the Boeing crew was staying in Fort Walton Beach, just across two-lane Scenic Highway 98 from the Gulf shore. They would play volleyball or romp with the kids on the Enclave’s private beach, then cook a seafood feast back at the complex. They had a lot of fun in Florida that winter.
They also worked hard. The mechanics helped as a crane lifted the sixteen-ton Osprey onto a run stand made of one tripod and one bipod of tubular steel, with a metal platform and stairs for access to the aircraft. The stand was tall enough for the Osprey’s thirty-eight-foot-diameter rotors to tilt all the way forward into airplane mode without hitting the floor. An ingenious set of welded steel ducts shaped like crab claws sat under the nacelles to suck the engine exhaust out of them at all angles and blow it out of the building. Painted in gray and green camouflage, Aircraft 4 looked bloated and spotted up there. One of the senior engineers on the test team, Bob Rayburn, nicknamed it “Piggy.”
From late February through late May, Piggy was run through the wringer. There were mechanical problems even at normal temperatures, though mostly annoyances of the sort expected in a prototype aircraft. The major pain was the Auxiliary Power Unit, an onboard engine akin to a car motor, which was needed to gin up enough electricity and hydraulic pressure to start the Osprey’s big 6,150-horsepower turbine engines. The APU’s clutch often disengaged, interrupting tests. There were other nuisances. Dust filters in the engine inlets called Engine Air Particle Separators tended to leak hydraulic fluid. Hydraulic lines in the nacelles leaked frequently. The mechanics had plenty to do.
The hardest work came during extreme temperature tests, when a crew would “fly” simulated missions featuring vertical “takeoffs” and “landings” sandwiched around run time in airplane mode. With the lab chilled to 40 below zero, and later minus 65, pilots, engineers, and mechanics had to wear arctic coveralls, arctic hoods, cold weather boots, and two layers of thermal underwear to fend off frostbite. When they waddled up the stairs in all that gear, Marine Major Paul Croisetiere, one of the test pilots, thought they looked like a gang of Pillsbury Dough-boys. The extreme cold and heat were hardest on the mechanics, who had to work longer hours in the lab than the pilots. They lined Aircraft 4’s back cabin bulkheads and flooring with two layers of special blankets, but frigid rotor downwash bled in during tests anyway, and the cold lingered afterward. If you took off a glove to do a task, then absent-mindedly touched something metal, your skin usually stuck to it. Lead mechanic Marty LeCloux hated having to walk out on the wing to work inside a nacelle after a cold weather test. The cold would leave frost on the Osprey’s skin, making it tricky to step on the slightly rounded, now slippery, wing. Like tightrope walkers in rehearsal, the mechanics would tie themselves to each other with ropes so that if one slipped, the other man’s weight would save him from hitting the floor. You could still get hurt if you fell, though, so you had to move gingerly. Working in extreme heat, when the temperature in the Main Chamber could hit 125 degrees, was even worse. It was easier to get warm than to cool off, and if your bare skin touched the aircraft or run stand, you could count on a burn. The temperatures were hard on Aircraft 4, too. Hydraulic fluid wouldn’t flow as it should, which meant swashplate actuators that changed the pitch of the rotor blades often didn’t work right. Metal parts developed cracks in the cold. One day the APU caught fire, though the blaze flamed out quickly.
The beating the prototype took in the McKinley lab delayed its scheduled flight to Quantico, where Major Kevin Dodge, the leader of the team of Marine Corps and Air Force pilots formed to help test the Osprey before it was fielded, was eagerly awaiting Aircraft 4’s arrival. Military aircraft go through two types of tests, “developmental” and “operational.” Developmental tests, such as those in the McKinley lab, are conducted by specially trained test pilots and engineers to assess whether the aircraft is built right and flies as it should. Operational testing is done by special military units manned by regular military personnel—pilots and crew chiefs,
for a transport like the Osprey—to see whether they have problems in using the aircraft. Dodge’s Multi-service Operational Test Team—known as the “mot” from its acronym, MOTT—had been organized at Quantico nearly two years earlier to do operational testing of the Osprey. With only four prototypes left after the loss of Aircraft 5, though, the MOTT’s pilots and mechanics rarely got their hands on one. They were eager for the chance to have Aircraft 4 to themselves, even if only for a few days, and Dodge had drawn up a detailed plan for tests the MOTT would do with the prototype at Quantico.
Dodge initially was told to expect the prototype to arrive in late May, but the schedule kept slipping until the return date became July 20. After the last test in the climatic lab on May 23, Aircraft 4 was beat up. It needed a lot of work before it could attempt the 760-mile trip to Quantico. Its engines had to be removed for maintenance and reinstalled in the nacelles, which took two weeks. The clutch on the proprotor gearbox in the right nacelle had to be changed, another big job. Then Aircraft 4 had to be flown near Eglin a few times to make sure it was airworthy.
The work took long enough that, with tourist season beginning, the Boeing crew’s families had to move from Fort Walton Beach to a complex in nearby Destin. The wives passed the time by taking the children to the beach most days. Sometimes they would see the Osprey flying out over the Gulf. “There’s Dad!” the kids would shout. “There’s the V-22!” That made Michelle Stecyk anxious. Oh, my God, if anything ever happens with all our kids out there, she would think. She also worried about how her husband, Tony, who loved to fly in the Osprey, was feeling during those flights over the Gulf. Tony was an avid boater and water skiier, but he never went on the water without a life preserver. Tony couldn’t swim. And he had a morbid fear of drowning.
The Dream Machine Page 28
