Theoretically, there was nothing wrong with doing both types of testing more or less simultaneously. An aircraft that works technically— the focus for developmental test pilots—still might prove unsuitable for those who have to use it. If changes are needed, better to find out as soon as possible. Trying to do developmental and operational tests with so few prototypes and so little time, though, wasn’t very practical, former Osprey test pilots recalled. To make things worse, developmental test pilots not only had to share the four EMD prototypes with the MOTT, they had to train the first six MOTT pilots to fly them. That “really cut into completing developmental testing,” one veteran Osprey test pilot told me.
The pilots’ biggest complaint was how the schedule for getting the Osprey into service drove everything. Developmental test pilots were constantly pressured by Navair and Bell-Boeing managers to get their work done. Until enough developmental testing was done, operational testing couldn’t be finished; until operational testing was finished, the Pentagon couldn’t approve Full Rate Production; until Full Rate Production was approved, the Marine Corps couldn’t put the Osprey into service. The flight test team worked six, sometimes seven days a week. A tight schedule, though, tended to defeat developmental testing’s purpose: to find problems, fix them, and then retest. How long doing that might take was hard to predict, especially for a tiltrotor. A tiltrotor needed to be tested not only like a helicopter and like an airplane but also in three other distinct “conversion modes” it flies, when its rotors are tilted at angles between zero and 90 degrees. Logically, it should take extra time and money to test the Osprey to the edges of its envelope, but extra time and money were commodities Navair and the Marine Corps didn’t think they had. The Pentagon and Congress were always breathing down their necks, wanting to know how much progress the Osprey was making before they spent more money on it. The solution was to hold developmental testing to as few “data points” as possible, just enough to get a rough outline of the Osprey’s flight envelope and see if it could do what its latest Joint Operational Requirements Document said it must.
“You always felt like you were rushing,” a military member of the Integrated Test Team in those days recalled. “You’d write a test plan to get fifty points and, because of delays, you might get thirty of them, and they’d say, ‘Okay, that’s good enough.’ I guess decision makers at the time decided that was acceptable risk.” A planned series of 103 flight control system and flying qualities tests, for example, was reduced to 49, and only 33 were flown in a real aircraft.
By August 1999, a month before Tiltrotor Technology Day at the Pentagon, the last major stage of the Osprey’s developmental test plan had been completed. The first four phases of operational testing were done as well. Bell was weeks away from opening a new plant in Amarillo, Texas, where production model Ospreys would be assembled in the future. The next and final step before the Pentagon decided on Full Rate Production would be for the MOTT to do the Osprey’s final phase of testing, Operational Evaluation, abbreviated OPEVAL, pronounced “OPP-ee-vall.”
OPEVAL was going to be grueling, both for the Osprey and the roughly 210 members of the MOTT, whose fourteen pilots would fly the first four LRIP Ospreys continually for six months in mock missions aimed at proving the aircraft’s suitability for war. The scenarios would cover every mission the Marines and the Air Force Special Operations Command had in their playbooks for the Osprey, from launching amphibious assaults off a windswept ship deck to infiltrating teams of commandos into hostile territory in terrain-hugging low-level flights, to rescuing embassy hostages under cloak of darkness. The MOTT would fly those missions in a variety of climates and at all hours of the day and night, from Pax River, from Marine Corps and Air Force bases in North Carolina, Florida, Arizona, and California, and from ships sailing off the east and west coasts.
For the Marines in the MOTT, the highlight, and most demanding part of OPEVAL, would be a series of exercises at the Marine Corps air station in Yuma, Arizona. Yuma was home to Marine Aviation Weapons and Tactics Squadron One, or MAWTS-1, the Marine Corps’ toughest and most prestigious aviation school. Its instructors were the best and its coursework the most demanding, both mentally and physically. Graduating as a weapons and tactics instructor from MAWTS-1 was a feat Marine pilots bragged about for years. Holding a WTI certificate qualified a pilot to teach tactics to others in his or her squadron. Two times a year, MAWTS-1 held special courses attended by entire squadrons of every aircraft the Marines fly, from transport and gun-ship helicopters and aerial refueling tankers to fighter jets. Supervised by MAWTS-1 instructors, those squadrons and Marine infantry units engaged in a series of exercises together, testing their ability to operate as an air-ground task force. To succeed, a squadron’s mechanics had to be in top form, keep their unit’s aircraft “mission capable.” A squad-ron’s pilots had to perform combat maneuvers while coordinating with other squadrons and ground units in complex missions. Those participating would be judged not only by MAWTS-1’s instructors but by their peers in other squadrons. For Marine aviators, going through a MAWTS course was like playing in the Super Bowl. It was the toughest test they would face short of going to war.
The MOTT’s leaders, Marine Lieutenant Colonel Keith Sweaney and Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Jim Shaffer, wrote the OPEVAL plan. The judge of whether the Osprey had passed, however, would be Philip Coyle, the assistant secretary of defense who ran the Pentagon’s Office of Operational Test and Evaluation, so Coyle had to approve the OPEVAL plan in advance. So did the MOTT’s higher-ups in the Marine Corps and the Air Force. OPEVAL was a big deal. Once it was over, if Coyle gave the Osprey passing grades, the Marines could expect the Pentagon to approve Full Rate Production. When that happened, the Corps would have its dream machine at last.
* * *
The MOTT’s job was to test the Osprey, not promote it, but the unit’s pilots were bubbling with enthusiasm long before OPEVAL began. MOTT leader Sweaney talked about the Osprey to his wife, Carol, a lot. Born in Charleston, West Virginia, Sweaney was a gifted athlete, named small college football player of the year when he played for Randolph-Macon College in Virginia. He joined the Marines after graduating from college in 1980 and flew CH-53 helicopters for close to a decade before being selected for the Osprey program. He had no doubt the tiltrotor was a dream machine, not just for the Marines but for civilian aviation, too.
Sweaney was hardly alone in his views. When Sweaney and Shaffer flew the first LRIP Osprey to Tiltrotor Technology Day in September 1999, they brought along Marine Major Paul Rock, Jr., to help with the VIPs and sing the Osprey’s praises to the media. Sweaney liked to use Rock as the MOTT’s public face, partly because of Rock’s own. Rock was thirty-three, married, and starting a family, but his smooth, lightly freckled cheeks gave him that sunny, All-American Boy look. He wasn’t Hollywood handsome, but he was good-looking. He stood six feet tall, weighed 185 pounds, and had military bearing. He kept his bright, carrot-colored hair cropped in a good Marine Corps “high and tight” cut. He held his head erect. Thanks to his last name and flame-orange hair, plus the cheek and talent of an enlisted Marine who decorated the side of Rock’s flight helmet when he was a lieutenant with a painting of a missile-shaped carrot blasting off, Rock’s radio call sign was “Rocket.” Rock was a “people person,” Sweaney and Shaffer agreed. He seemed to light up in front of an audience, and though he’d flown the Osprey for the first time only three months before Tiltrotor Technology Day, Rock was sold. “The thing accelerates like a scalded dog,” Rock said in one videotaped interview at the Pentagon event, the corners of his mouth turning up in a kid-in-a-candy-store grin. Rock had been in the MOTT since 1997, but he’d had to wait two years to fly the Osprey because there were so few of them. Rock’s first flight, though, had made him a true believer. “It handles perfectly fine as a helicopter, but you can tell it wants to go fast,” Rock told his interviewer. “It takes off, it gets going so fast, it’s like the plane’s trying to slip out from unde
rneath you.” Rock thought the Osprey really was a dream machine.
* * *
Strictly speaking, promoting the tiltrotor to the civilian world had never been Dick Spivey’s job. By the mid-1990s, he was overseeing a military tiltrotor marketing staff big enough to field an after-work softball team, the “Pentagon Pedlars.” Spivey was always ready, though, to do what he could to help Bell rekindle civilian interest, which had all but died when Cheney was trying to cancel the Osprey from 1989 to 1992. Back then, Curt Weldon and others in the Osprey camp had often warned that the Japanese or someone else overseas would build the dream machine if the United States didn’t. No one did. Interest among potential civilian customers—commercial airlines, medical services, oil companies with offshore drilling platforms—evaporated when it appeared the U.S. military might drop the Osprey. Deals that Bell had made with British Aerospace, Dornier of Germany, and Aeritalia to test the tiltrotor market in Europe—announced at the 1989 Paris Air Show by Bell President Jack Horner—produced nothing. In 1990, two Japanese companies that had offered Bell and Boeing $250 million in “up-front” money for a joint venture to develop a civilian tiltrotor in their country withdrew the proposition. A third Japanese company, which had bought a building at an industrial airport near Fort Worth and hired some Bell tiltrotor engineers to build a civilian tilt-wing aircraft, abandoned the plan after a couple of years. Bell itself, preoccupied with trying to save the Osprey, shelved plans to develop a small tiltrotor for the civilian market while Cheney was secretary of defense. Webb Joiner, who succeeded Horner as Bell’s president in 1991, told me that Spivey and a few other Bell marketers were “rabid” for the idea. They pestered him constantly to launch such a project. Joiner refused as long as the Osprey was in jeopardy. “I felt like we had to let the V-22 demonstrate to the world the capability,” Joiner explained.
Bell’s marketing department set out to revive civilian interest in the tiltrotor after Clinton took office in 1993, and Spivey was eager to pitch in. One day in 1995, he got a call from a Marine Corps recruiter in California who said a Hollywood film producer wanted to borrow a tiltrotor for a new movie. Could Bell help? When Spivey found out what the producer had in mind, he urged Joiner to offer the XV-15 for the project. The film’s opening scene would show an elderly woman being flown out to a research vessel sailing off the coast of Newfoundland, where she was wanted to identify objects brought up from a shipwreck she had survived decades earlier. A tiltrotor would be ideal for the part, the producer thought, because it would look more futuristic than a helicopter, conveying to the audience how many years had passed since the ship had sunk.
Spivey was disappointed when Bell declined the request. The project would cost the company too much, the executives decided, and the film-makers were insisting the XV-15 would have to fly off the coast of Nova Scotia. The XV-15 still belonged to NASA, and while the agency had let Bell use it to market the tiltrotor concept for years, every flight was technically a test. Flying the XV-15 in the humid and sometimes frigid air over the North Atlantic would risk running into rain or ice that might damage the strain gauges on its rotors. Besides, who knew if the movie would draw a big enough audience to make the whole exercise worth the trouble and expense?
When the film came out in December 1997, Spivey could only shake his head at what an opportunity Bell had missed. The movie won eleven Academy Awards and was one of the highest-grossing films in the history of Hollywood. It’s title was Titanic.
Bell often used the XV-15 in promotional videos of its own, and Spivey enjoyed producing them. In 1995, he played a cameo role in a mini-drama he scripted himself with his counterpart in Bell’s civilian marketing department. They spent $35,000 to have the XV-15 repainted metallic silver and black like an executive jet, then filmed it taking off from a new heliport the city of Dallas had built and landing on a helipad at a Bell office building near Fort Worth. They spliced in video of a man in airline pilot garb greeting Spivey and some other briefcase-toting marketers as they apparently boarded and deboarded the little tiltrotor. A viewer could get the impression tiltrotor service was already a reality. “None of us could get in because there wasn’t any room for us,” Spivey recalled with a laugh years later. The XV-15’s cabin was crammed with test instruments and had no seats, he explained, “But they faked it pretty good, actually.” Bell showed the video at trade shows all over the world, trying to encourage life to imitate marketing art.
With the Osprey apparently back on track, Bell was now going allout once again to get people excited about the tiltrotor’s civilian potential. In June 1995, the company took the XV-15 to the Paris Air Show for the first time since 1981. Navair and the Marines sent one of the scarce Osprey prototypes to Paris that year as well, where it and the XV-15 performed what Aviation Week called a “daily pas de deux.” With U.S. defense budgets tight, both Bell-Boeing and the Marines were hoping the militaries of America’s allies abroad might decide they needed Ospreys, too. Foreign sales that increased the Osprey’s production run would be one way to get its price down.
Spivey and his old Marine Corps briefing partner Bob Magnus, now a brigadier general, went to Paris again that November to try to interest the French military in the Osprey. As a young action officer in the Marine Corps aviation branch, Magnus had been a prime mover in getting the Osprey started in 1981–83. His career had taken him away from the issue after 1984, but by then he had “drunk the Kool-Aid” on the tiltrotor. Like Spivey, Magnus was still a true believer. While assigned to the Pentagon’s Joint Staff from 1989 to 1993, Magnus had watched the Cheney fight from the sidelines. During his stint there, though, he had earned a master’s degree in business administration from Strayer College in Washington with a thesis titled “An Assessment of Civil Tiltrotor Market Potential.” In his thesis, Magnus cited University of Texas and NASA studies estimating that tiltrotor passenger fares would have to be 32 percent higher than those for equivalent turboprop planes and that civil tiltrotors would cost on average 50 percent more to build. Still, Magnus saw a bright future for commercial tiltrotors. “In the year 2000, tiltrotors could capture from one to two thirds of the U.S. short-haul market,” he wrote. Magnus estimated the market in the United States, Europe, and Japan at 1,200 to 5,000 aircraft.
Bell and Boeing decided to go after part of that potential market in 1996. On November 18 that year, in a news conference at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, the Osprey partners announced a joint venture to produce a nine-passenger tiltrotor for civilian use. Spivey had been urging Bell president Joiner to launch such a project for years, even suggested he might like to give up military marketing and sell a small civil tiltrotor instead. Joiner ignored that idea, so Spivey remained a military marketer, but he flew to Washington to be on hand for the civil tiltrotor announcement. The idea of bringing the masses such a versatile aircraft for everyday transport was what really fired Spivey’s imagination. The Osprey intrigued him, and he was excited about it, but a civil tiltrotor was his real dream machine. Spivey wasn’t the only one smitten with the tiltrotor as a commercial aircraft. “Timing Looks Right for Civil Tilt-Rotor,” Aviation Week reported in that year’s March 18 issue.
Joiner told the news conference that Bell and Boeing might sell as many as a thousand of the planned Bell-Boeing 609 civilian tiltrotors over the next twenty years for about $10 million each. That would be about twice the price of a helicopter the same size, but the 609 would fly 500 miles without refueling and cruise at 275 knots. That would give it 350 miles more range and more than twice the speed of a helicopter. It would be perfect for medical and rescue services, oil companies with offshore drilling platforms, maybe even the U.S. Coast Guard, Joiner said. If the Osprey succeeded, he added, the companies would pursue the “next logical step” and design a civilian tiltrotor big enough to carry forty to seventy passengers. Wiser by now about the problems inherent in a 50–50 partnership, the companies had agreed that Bell would take 51 percent of the 609 project and any other tiltroto
rs they designed for fewer than nineteen passengers; Boeing would take 51 percent of any future projects to build tiltrotors carrying twenty or more passengers. The 609 would make its first flight in 1999, Joiner predicted, be certified as safe by the FAA in 2001, and be delivered to the first customer in 2002.
By 1999, however, the 609 still hadn’t flown, and Boeing Helicopters had dropped out of the project. Boeing Seattle had never been keen on the idea of civilian tiltrotors, and Boeing Helicopters had never succeeded with civilian products. Bell found a new partner for the 609 in Agusta S.p.A. of Italy, though, and the new BellAgusta Aerospace Company joint venture had taken several dozen advance orders for the renamed BA-609. Besides those in the United States, customers in Australia, Brazil, Britain, Canada, Dubai, Germany, Japan, Norway, Poland, and South Korea were eagerly awaiting their tiltrotors. Celebrity private pilots including professional golfer Greg Norman and Ross Perot, Jr., son of the famous billionaire, had placed orders for 609s, too.
The dream wasn’t just alive, Spivey could see it coming true.
* * *
The dream turned into a nightmare the evening of April 8, 2000, at a dusty desert airfield near the southeastern Arizona town of Marana. The Marine and Air Force pilots and maintainers of the Multiservice Operational Test Team, the MOTT, had begun the Osprey’s most important stage of testing yet, Operational Evaluation, five months earlier. The results of OPEVAL would determine whether the Osprey could go into Full Rate Production, so the aviation branch at Headquarters Marine Corps was paying close attention. The Marine Corps’ deputy commandant for aviation, Lieutenant General Fred McCorkle, had visited Pax River on November 3, 1999, to kick the tests off. Legally, the MOTT reported to the Navy’s Operational Test and Evaluation Force and to Pentagon test director Philip Coyle. As the head of Marine Corps aviation, though, McCorkle took a keen interest in what the MOTT was doing, and as a practical matter, the Marines in the unit answered to him as well. “Tell us what it does, tell us what it can’t do,” McCorkle told the pilots.
The Dream Machine Page 33
