Jones and his guests didn’t know it, but their Osprey flight hadn’t been as smooth as it seemed, either. Shortly after taking off like a helicopter with the VIPs in back, Shaffer and Sweaney were chagrined to discover that one of the tiltrotor’s two engines was delivering less than full power. The plan had been to fly the VIPs around Washington’s approved helicopter routes with the nacelles tilted at 60 degrees, putting the rotors far enough forward to let the passengers feel the Osprey’s power, but not far enough to exceed the capital’s speed limit for helicopters. Now they were going to have to land as soon as possible, but trying to make a vertical landing back onto the parade ground without full power might be risky. Sweaney, forty-one, and Shaffer, thirty-nine, were Gulf War veterans, combat pilots who’d been in tighter spots than this. They quickly decided their best bet would be to convert the Osprey’s nacelles all the way to zero degrees—airplane mode—to gain enough speed to get plenty of lift under the wing, then fly over to nearby Andrews Air Force Base.
They could convert the nacelles back to 60 degrees there and make a safe roll-on landing on a runway. As Shaffer began converting the nacelles, the Osprey leapt forward, sending bottles of water for the VIPs tumbling in the back cabin. Halfway to Andrews, though, Shaffer and Sweaney diagnosed the engine problem. Like many modern aircraft engines, the Osprey’s were regulated by computer for maximum efficiency through devices called FADECs, pronounced “FAY-decks,” an acronym for Full Authority Digital Engine Control. By switching the problem engine to a backup FADEC, the pilots were able to restore full power and complete the flight as originally planned. None of their VIP passengers was the wiser. When Shaffer set the Osprey down back at the Pentagon parade ground, Jones and his guests came walking down the back ramp with big smiles on their faces and joined Secretary Cohen at a lectern on the grass.
“Every few decades of this century, the world has witnessed the arrival of weapons platforms that have truly revolutionized national security,” Cohen began, flanked by Jones and the lawmakers. “This technology is the revolution in military affairs,” Cohen continued, using a popular phrase of the day. “These aircraft,” he added, “through development and now into production, have stayed on time and within budget. And as the members of Congress will tell you today, that is no small accomplishment.”
Cohen apparently was referring to the most recent batch of prototypes. As a program, the Osprey actually was eight years behind its original schedule and had cost nearly $3 billion more to develop than anticipated. No one asked Cohen to clarify what he meant, though, when he invited the reporters to pose questions.
“I’d like to ask you about Indonesia,” the first journalist Cohen called on said. The Pentagon press corps was less interested in tiltrotors than in whether the United States might send troops to intervene in a crisis in East Timor.
“Does anybody here have a question about the V-22?” Cohen asked plaintively.
“Not really,” another reporter replied.
Cohen started taking questions on East Timor.
The Osprey was no longer big news. As every cub reporter learns, “Man Bites Dog” is news; “Dog Bites Man” isn’t much of a story, and certainly won’t get you on the front page. In 1999, the Osprey was a dog-bites-man story.
* * *
If the media had largely lost interest in the Osprey, the Marines wanted it more badly than ever. Over the past seven years, they had spent roughly half a billion dollars to keep their Vietnam-era CH-46 helicopters flying by upgrading engines and other parts to extend their service life from 10,000 to 15,000 flight hours. Over those years, seven Marine Corps “Phrogs” had crashed, killing seventeen Marines and other passengers. In 1998, General Charles Krulak, testifying to the Senate Armed Services Committee for one of the last times as commandant, said he was looking for ways to speed up Osprey purchases. “I would tell you that the greatest return on investment lies in procuring the V-22 tiltrotor airplane as rapidly as possible,” Krulak said. “There is no new capability being procured by the DoD today which yields such a significant, such a revolutionary difference, in our ability to fight the nation’s battles, as the V-22 Osprey.” Krulak’s enthusiasm for the Osprey got the better of him. “Because it flies at speeds only achievable with a fixed-wing aircraft and because it can refuel in flight, the Osprey can self-deploy,” he told the committee. “We can pick up combat-loaded Marines in CONUS [Continental United States] and move them to points of crisis quite literally anywhere in the world.” The Osprey never had been expected to carry troops when it self-deployed, just aircrews, but no one contradicted the commandant. His point was clear. The Osprey would give the Marine Corps capabilities it had never before had. Now, a year after Krulak’s testimony, all that remained to be done before the Marines could field the Osprey was for it to pass a final round of tests in realistic missions and for the Pentagon to approve Full Rate Production. After that, once enough were built and sufficient pilots and crews had been trained, the Marines could start turning CH-46 squadrons into Osprey squadrons. The target date for starting the transition was 2001.
The Marines and the Bell-Boeing partnership had been racing toward that goal ever since President Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, which removed the Osprey’s two biggest foes from the Pentagon. When Bush administration Defense Secretary Dick Cheney departed, so did David Chu, the Osprey skeptic who had run the powerful Office of Program Analysis & Evaluation for more than a decade. The Osprey had been in the defense budget every year since their departure, though the Marines and their allies on Capitol Hill had to work hard to keep it there. With the Cold War over, sentiment for cutting defense spending ran high in the 1990s. Clinton shrank the size of all the armed forces, and in 1997, a top-level review decided a smaller Marine Corps needed fewer Ospreys. Instead of the 552 the Marines had long intended to buy, their future fleet now was to number only 360. The Air Force, cut out of the program in the Cheney years, now planned to buy 50 for its Special Operations Command. For the first time since the 1980s, the Navy was also back on record as wanting 48 Ospreys as search-and-rescue aircraft, though insiders said the admirals weren’t really that interested. The total Osprey “buy,” in Pentagon lingo, was now to be only 458, barely half the 913 that Bell and Boeing had hoped to sell all four armed services when the program began in 1983.
As with most major military purchases in those days, the Osprey buy also was going to be spread over more years to keep annual defense budgets down. The smaller buy, the stretched-out production schedule, and the cost of design changes, as well as inflation, were going to make the Osprey a lot more expensive than originally advertised. By the time mass production began, the cost of each Osprey was expected to average $55 million, though Bell and Boeing insisted they could get that sticker price down as they got better at producing them.
The companies said they could do that because now they had a cheaper design. Under the Engineering and Manufacturing Development contract announced at Ridley Park in 1992 by Dan Quayle when he was vice president, Bell and Boeing had made major changes in the aircraft. The redesigned Osprey was so different—about 80 percent of the engineering drawings were new—that it was designated the “B” model, with the Marine Corps version called the MV-22B and the Air Force version the CV-22B.
One of the biggest differences was using aluminum in key parts of the fuselage instead of composites, the carbon epoxy and other non-metal materials used in the first prototypes on the theory that would save weight. The theory had proven wrong. Using composites to make frames and formers—the skeleton of the fuselage—had turned out to be far more difficult and costly than anticipated. Boeing learned the hard way that arranging pliable strips of special fibers in layers thick enough to do that job, then baking them stiff in an autoclave, was a slow, labor-intensive, and inexact process. Two or three workers needed three to four weeks to make a frame, and no two frames ever came out of the autoclave with the same exact thickness and strength. In the 1980s, Boeing had been forced to thro
w out 30–40 percent of its composite frames, a huge loss in time and money. By 1991, though, a new high-speed machining process made it possible to make fuselage frames out of aluminum with greater precision and strength than previously. Aluminum frames for the Osprey weighed about six pounds less than the old composite frames, and making frames and bulkheads of aluminum eliminated 18,500 metal fasteners previously needed to hold composite structures in place. The new Osprey was no longer mostly composite, just 43 percent.
Bell had redesigned its composite wing, too, after “live fire testing”— shooting it with real bullets—showed that the seventeen composite spars used in the original design weren’t strong enough to meet the Osprey’s survivability requirement. Six of the spars, the ribs that hold a wing’s shape, were replaced with titanium in the EMD prototypes.
There were other major changes. The companies corrected design inadequacies exposed by the crash of Aircraft 4 at Quantico in 1992 by putting a drain in the Osprey’s engine cowlings and extending a titanium firewall in its nacelles to protect the composite pylon driveshaft from fire. The Allison engines were upgraded to get more power from them while burning less fuel, and the Osprey’s transmissions and gear-boxes were beefed up to accommodate the extra horsepower. The old “bed frame” wing stow mechanism was replaced with Boeing engineer Bill Rumberger’s light and cheaper “flex ring,” the design that got him dubbed “Lord of the Ring” around Ridley Park.
The companies cut another 800 pounds out of the B model Osprey by redesigning the electronic displays in the cockpit that took the place of the dials and gauges in older aircraft. The advent of liquid crystal displays made it possible to get rid of the original Osprey’s bulky, balky cathode-ray tubes, which had driven test pilots to distraction with their overheating and frequent failures. Galloping advances in computer-assisted design software and in new machines used to fabricate composites, plus the experience Bell and Boeing engineers and workers had gained from developing the prototypes, were making it possible to improve the Osprey’s design in other ways as well.
After lengthy study, the companies also replaced the Blottle. The new Thrust Control Lever was more ergonomic and no longer moved in an arc that made it feel like a helicopter collective. The TCL’s top was shaped like a small bicycle seat, so that instead of gripping the lever like a baseball bat, pilots could rest their left hand atop it, reducing arm fatigue and wrist strain. The TCL still moved forward to add power and backward to reduce it, but when it added power, it no longer moved downward. The change was expected to reduce the risk of “collective dyslexia,” the chance that a pilot trained to fly helicopters would push the TCL the wrong way in an emergency, as Boeing test pilot Grady Wilson thought he might have done in the 1991 crash of Aircraft 5.
Navair approved the revamped designs in December 1994. Three years later, the Defense Acquisition Board, a top-level Pentagon committee, approved putting the Osprey into limited production, though flight-testing was still in its early stages. Only one of the four new “production representative” prototypes to be built under the EMD contract had made its maiden flight, and only two of the five prototypes built under the 1986 Full Scale Development contract were still flying. The boundaries of the Osprey’s capabilities—what pilots and engineers call the “flight envelope”—had barely been explored. Even so, for the Pentagon to give Navair and the companies permission to start buying parts and tools for production at this stage was normal under a procurement practice known as “concurrent development.” Critics derided it as “buy before you fly” and warned that it was risky.
The practice had evolved in the years after World War II, as military hardware grew more and more complex. In the old days, aircraft and other major equipment could be developed, tested, and cranked out of factories in volume with head-spinning speed, sometimes within months. By the 1960s, though, as technology grew more sophisticated, such items were taking years to develop. Given the sluggish pace of the procurement bureaucracy, military aircraft in particular often risked becoming obsolete before they entered mass production. To reduce that risk, the Defense Department started paying contractors to set up production lines and start making small numbers of production models of aircraft, tanks, and the like before they were fully tested. The idea was to allow manufacturers to work out kinks in their factory lines before mass production began and use the first production models for testing. Contractors liked it because they made money on such deals, and because setting up production lines early created jobs, giving members of Congress a bigger stake in a program. These early purchases were called Low Rate Initial Production, abbreviated LRIP and pronounced “ELL-rip.” On Tiltrotor Technology Day in September 1999, the commandant and his congressional guests were riding in the first LRIP Osprey.
To speed the Osprey along, during the 1990s the Marine Corps had gotten a Pentagon panel called the Joint Requirements Oversight Council to ease some of the Osprey’s many requirements. Several “must” capabilities devised in 1983, when the goal was to build a tiltrotor able to do ten missions for four armed services, had been modified or discarded. Now the Osprey was being built only for the Marines and the Air Force, and to do fewer missions. As of 1995, the “self-deployment” requirement was to fly 2,100 nautical miles with one aerial refueling, rather than make it the whole way on a single tank of gas. The range requirement for Air Force special operations missions was now 500 nautical miles, rather than 700.
By Defense Department regulation, a new aircraft can move from LRIP into Full Rate Production—where contractors make their greatest profits—only after passing both developmental testing, conducted by special test pilots and engineers, and operational testing, conducted by military pilots and personnel. By Tiltrotor Technology Day, the Osprey was only a few months away from finishing both. The schedule had been compressed so the Marines could field their tiltrotor by 2001. Over the past seven years, the Marine Corps had pressed Bell-Boeing and Navair relentlessly to stick to that schedule, many involved in the program told me. “The push was all the way from the commandant right through the program office,” said Webb Joiner, who was president of Bell Helicopter in those days. “They would have loved to move a lot faster.”
Like the Osprey itself, its flight test program had been radically redesigned after Bell and Boeing got their EMD contract in 1992. The companies were reluctant, but Navair ordered them to consolidate developmental testing, the kind done by professional test pilots, at Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland. Navair also rejected a Bell-Boeing proposal to build six new prototypes, saying it would cost too much. The EMD contract provided funding only to build four new prototypes and modify two of the old ones.
The Osprey wasn’t the only program being treated that way. “Tremendous oversight pressures from governing bodies and funding sources are dictating shorter program schedules, less flying and avoidance of hazardous testing altogether,” Aviation Week reported in its June 12, 1995, issue. “Flight test officials are adamant that skimping on development testing is much more expensive in the long term. They unanimously agree that, if there is any chance that a fighter, helicopter or transport aircraft can get into a particular flight condition, sooner or later it will. At that point, the man or woman flying the aircraft in line service becomes the test pilot, if that condition was skipped or deleted from the original evaluation.” For the Osprey, that warning proved prophetic.
Developmental testing of the Osprey resumed in the summer of 1993, a year after the crash of Aircraft 4 at Quantico, Virginia. Bell and Boeing test pilots assigned to the project relocated to Pax River, as everyone called Maryland’s Patuxent River Naval Air Station. They worked in a 350-person “Integrated Test Team” with company and Navair engineers, company and military test pilots and mechanics, and other specialists. For four years, all the pilots had to fly were two original Osprey prototypes, modified with what engineers and pilots call “scab-on” changes to remedy the design flaws blamed for the Aircraft 4 crash. The pace picked up in Feb
ruary 1997, when the new EMD prototypes started arriving. Even so, with only six aircraft to fly, getting every developmental test flown was problematic.
One problem was the weather at Pax River, located on the Chesapeake Bay about sixty miles southeast of Washington, D.C. In summer, heavy humidity often made the sky so hazy it was “like flying in a glass of milk,” one former Osprey developmental test pilot remembered. In winter, flights might be scrubbed because of overcast skies, rain, or occasional snow. When they flew, test pilots often spent a lot of time circumnavigating clouds because the rotor blades on the Osprey prototypes were equipped with strain gauges, the tiny wire filaments used to measure stresses. Rain drops become tiny projectiles that can rip a strain gauge off when they hit a rotor blade whirling at hundreds of miles an hour, so rain clouds had to be avoided. In good weather the air around Pax River was congested with other traffic, and emergency landing sites were in short supply. The base was home to the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School, but a lot of pilots wondered why. The only advantage many saw to Pax River was its proximity to Washington. That made it easy for bigwigs to visit.
Even after all four EMD prototypes had been delivered in 1998, developmental test pilots had to share two with the Multiservice Operational Test Team. The MOTT’s military pilots were on a tight schedule to get the Osprey’s operational testing done so the Marines could field it in 2001. To compensate for the shortage of prototypes, Navair and the Marines overlapped developmental and operational testing as much as possible, with approval from the Pentagon’s director of operational test and evaluation, Philip Coyle.
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