That was what the MOTT set out to do. OPEVAL was supposed to be a six-month road trip for the unit. Afterward, most of its Marine Corps pilots and mechanics were to transfer to a new Osprey training squadron at New River Marine Corps Air Station, so many sold homes near Pax River or Quantico and moved their families to North Carolina in advance. They didn’t expect to see their wives and children much until OPEVAL was over. There was no time to lose. OPEVAL had to be done in time for the Pentagon to approve Full Rate Production before the end of 2000 if the Marines were going to field the Osprey in 2001. There wouldn’t be much point in putting the Osprey into service if it wasn’t going into Full Rate Production. By law, up to 10 percent of a major defense equipment purchase could be done as LRIP, but a delay in getting Full Rate Production approved would signal there were problems with the Osprey. Programs with problems often lost their funding. When the hungry lions within the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill hunt for defense dollars, the law of the jungle applies: To limp is to die.
The MOTT started OPEVAL in November at Pax River, did some tests at New River, then in December flew two Ospreys to an amphibious assault ship sailing in the Atlantic, the USS Saipan. There the schedule broke down. A few days after they arrived on the Saipan, they began running short of parts. Swashplate actuators, the hydraulic devices that change the pitch of rotor blades, were failing at unexpected rates. The new blade fold/wing stow mechanism wasn’t working right. Problems with little things, like batteries for electronic navigation systems, forced the MOTT to cancel test flights. A company of Marines sent to the ship to fly mock missions in the Osprey was left idle. After nine days, the MOTT halted all tests and went back to Pax River to wait for Bell and Boeing to deliver the parts they needed. They stayed there through January.
By February, they were back to flying, and over the next three months the team spent a lot of time in the air. They flew the first four LRIP Ospreys to the West Coast to do shipboard tests aboard the USS Essex in the Pacific. They flew them empty and with troops in the back. They hovered over the ship while a dozen or more Marines fast-roped to the deck out of the back ramp of an Osprey to simulate boarding a hostile vessel. With a full load of twenty-four Marines in the back, they simulated an amphibious assault on Catalina Island off the Southern California coast. The MOTT’s nearly two hundred enlisted mechanics, electronics technicians, and other maintainers kept busy. All aircraft require hours of work in the hangar for each hour flown, but the Osprey’s “readiness rate,” how often aircraft are mechanically fit to fly, was a disappointment. The Osprey was a new aircraft with thousands of parts, and a lot of them were breaking or wearing out earlier than predicted. Still, by the time the MOTT got to the Marine Corps Air Station in Yuma, Arizona, in early March, its fourteen pilots had logged more than four hundred flight hours during OPEVAL. Things were starting to click.
Like most military pilots, the MOTT’s were by and large “type A” personalities—driven, competitive, goal-oriented. They were all young men, mostly in their thirties, but several were veterans of the 1991 Gulf War. They were all confident, in some cases cocky. Most had applied for the MOTT, a cadre whose pilots and mechanics would teach and lead others in the Marine Corps and Air Force to fly and maintain the Osprey as it was fielded. Marine Major Mike Westman, who had flown CH-46s a dozen years before joining the MOTT in 1997, felt he was part of an elite group, some of the best and most professional military pilots around. All but one, Major John A. “Boot” Brow, were helicopter pilots with hundreds or even thousands of hours in the CH-53 Super Stallion or the CH-46 Sea Knight, which the Marines were still pumping money into and flying. Brow, at thirty-nine one of the oldest in the unit, was the only career fixed-wing pilot, a talented KC-130 driver—he had 3,400 hours in the aerial refueling tanker—and a former MAWTS-1 instructor. As preparation for the Osprey, Brow took helicopter training, logging about sixty hours in three types.
Over the three years most of them had been together, the pilots had grown close. Originally based at Quantico, the MOTT moved its headquarters to Patuxent River in 1998, when the unit started flying the Osprey more often. Most pilots moved their families there as well, but some left them at Quantico, commuting the eighty-eight miles home for weekends. One was Major James B. “Trigger” Schafer, sometimes confused by outsiders with the MOTT’s Air Force leader, Lieutenant Colonel Jim Shaffer, or even former Desert One pilot and Osprey program manager Colonel Jim Schaefer, who had retired from Marine Corps seven years earlier. Trigger Schafer, who had begun his career as an enlisted metalsmith working on CH-46s, bunked during the workweek in a 40-foot boat he docked at Solomons Island, a waterfront village at the confluence of the Patuxent River and Chesapeake Bay. Major Michael L. “Murf ” Murphy, a New York- born former CH-53 pilot who could enter a room full of strangers and leave with two new friends, shared the boat with Schafer. MOTT commander Sweaney slept weeknights on a boat a couple of slips down. Back home, their wives were friends and their children played together. Major Brooks S. Gruber, a Massachusetts native, gave Schafer’s young son tips on playing ice hockey. Everybody liked Gruber, a former CH-53 pilot whose radio call sign was “Chucky,” taken from the cult horror film Child’s Play, whose lead character was a doll with a wicked grin. Gruber was a practical joker with an impish sense of humor. He dubbed Major Ronald S. “Curly” Culp’s little Polynesian green Jeep Tracker “the Barbie Jeep,” partly because Culp had two young daughters who played with Barbie dolls. One day when Culp and a couple of other pilots drove out to lunch in it, Gruber, Murphy, and a couple of others snuck into the restaurant parking lot and turned the Barbie Jeep sideways between two cars so Culp couldn’t drive it out. Gruber cackled like his movie namesake over that one. Rock, the redhaired major Sweaney liked to use as the MOTT’s public face, considered Gruber one of his best friends. They had been the two most junior officers when they joined the MOTT in 1997. They bonded in those days partly by commiserating about their inability to get Osprey flight time with the MOTT and Navair’s developmental test pilots sharing the half-dozen aircraft available. During the January 2000 hiatus in OPEVAL, Rock and Gruber roomed together in enlisted barracks at Pax River and cemented their friendship.
Traveling for OPEVAL tightened the unit’s bonds. Not long after they arrived at the Marine Corps air station in Yuma, Rock spotted an F-5 fighter plane on the ramp, a needle-nosed jet flown by an “aggressor squadron” to show Marine pilots enemy tactics. Brow, the former KC-130 pilot who had been a MAWTS-1 instructor, knew the squadron commander and got Rock a flight in the F-5. Rock thought that was really cool. Brow was six years older, and as his salt-and-pepper hair emphasized, one of the old hands in the unit. On the ground, Brow was the MOTT’s director of safety and Rock was its safety officer, so Brow was also Rock’s immediate supervisor. They were too far apart in age and seniority to be buddies, but Rock liked the way Brow looked out for him.
Interservice rivalry aside, Lieutenant Colonel Jim Shaffer thought his Air Force contingent of the MOTT enjoyed working with the Marines. At Yuma, the Air Force and Marine Corps groups quartered in separate motels for administrative reasons but crossed the street every day to eat breakfast and dinner together. The MOTT’s officers and enlisted maintainers got along well, too. Military law and regulations bar “fraternization” between ranks—social relationships that erode discipline or the chain of command—but with the Osprey so new, pilots and maintainers had to put their heads together to solve problems no one had encountered before. They grew close. In the evening, it wasn’t unusual to see officers and enlisted in civilian clothes cooking burgers together on a grill in the courtyard of the Best Western where the Marines were staying. Sometimes one of the guys would pull out a guitar and Corporal Kelly Keith, a cherub-cheeked twenty-two-year-old crew chief from South Carolina with a wrestler’s build and a terrific voice, would sing with Sergeant Michael Moffitt, another crew chief the same age from the Philadelphia suburbs. At Pax River, Keith and Moffitt often went to karaoke bars together.
Moffitt thought Keith sang “Let Her Cry,” by Hootie and the Blowfish, just the way it sounded on the CD.
The best part of OPEVAL for the pilots was flying the Osprey often, something they had been anticipating for years. Until the LRIP Ospreys arrived and OPEVAL began, no one in the MOTT had been able to accumulate many hours in the aircraft. The more they got under their belts, the more comfortable they were getting in the tiltrotor, whose unique characteristics most had experienced largely in computerized simulators up until then. By the time they hit Yuma, Major Curly Culp thought the MOTT was clicking like never before. They were making nearly all their missions. Everyone was flying well. They were putting the Osprey through its paces.
The Osprey’s flight manual was still a work in progress, so they flew according to a Navair “flight clearance placard,” a thick document that set limits on altitudes, speeds, and maneuvers. Navair had issued this flight envelope based on flights by developmental test pilots, but given the tight schedule they had worked under, it was still loosely defined, a sort of connect-the-dots image rather than a complete picture. Within it, there were lots of ways to fly that had never been tested, lots of maneuvers a pilot might want to use in combat that no one had ever tried. As the MOTT pilots gained experience in the Osprey, they started trying some.
“Experimentation was encouraged within the limits of the flight clearance,” Shaffer told me, and he offered an example. Shaffer was a special operations pilot, a combat veteran experienced in the treacherous task of dropping and retrieving commandos in hostile territory under cover of darkness. He wanted to find out whether an Osprey could get into a landing zone more quietly than a helicopter. The Osprey’s rotors made just as much noise as a helicopter’s when it flew like one, but when flying like an airplane, the tiltrotor was hard to hear until it got right on top of you. Could an Osprey sneak up on a landing zone by approaching it in airplane mode, then making a sharp turn into the zone as the pilot converted its rotors to helicopter mode, Shaffer wondered? A couple of weeks after the MOTT got to Yuma, Shaffer tried it. When he pushed his stick right to roll out of the turn while converting his Osprey’s nacelles to helicopter mode, the aircraft didn’t respond immediately. That made for an anxious moment. Shaffer had discovered a glitch in the Osprey’s flight control software that needed fixing.
The Marines in the MOTT were trying other maneuvers. Some went up against the F-5 aggressor squadron, getting jumped by one of the speedy fighters while flying a normal mission, then juking and deking in airplane mode, firing off chaff and flares to fool missiles, and diving for the deck. For a young military pilot, it didn’t get much more exciting than that. Sweaney and Shaffer never caught anyone violating the limits of their flight clearance, but in their enthusiasm, some skirted the edges. They were aggressive young men, and they were flying the Osprey hard. They were wringing it out, seeing what it could do.
By Yuma, the MOTT had flown dozens of mock missions with Marine infantry and Air Force special operations troops in the back cabins of their Ospreys. OPEVAL’s purpose was to fly the Osprey as it would be flown in combat, and that meant carrying troops. Finding out how they felt about the ride was an important part of OPEVAL, the only way to learn if the aircraft would be effective in real missions, so the MOTT gave its passengers surveys to fill out. They asked fundamental questions: What was it like for you riding in the back? Was it cramped? Was it stuffy? When you ride in a V-22, are you combat-effective when you jump off it? The MOTT pilots would have to know the answers when they wrote their final OPEVAL report.
The mission to Marana on April 8 would be another carrying passengers, an exercise called a “Noncombatant Evacuation Operation,” simulating the rescue of civilians from an embassy. Marines would play the role of evacuees; Marana Northwest Regional Airport, twenty-five miles northwest of Tucson, would play the embassy. The MOTT had done similar missions before. This time, though, they would fly at night, which would make it more challenging.
There was another challenge. The mission to Marana was part of a MAWTS-1 course in Assault Support Tactics. That meant the Ospreys would be in the air with twenty-six helicopters and jets from other Marine Corps squadrons—big CH-46s and CH-53s, little Huey transport and Cobra gunship helicopters, fast-moving F-18 Hornet fighter jets, KC-130 refueling tankers. The crews of the various aircraft would have to follow their parts of the choreography closely, fall into place like shards in a kaleidoscope, to make the complete picture come together. Still, for the Ospreys, the mission template was fairly straightforward.
At about 7:10 P.M., eight Marine pilots would take off from Yuma in the MOTT’s four Ospreys, tilt their rotors to airplane mode, climb to 9,500 feet above sea level—about 7,500 feet over the ground, given Arizona’s elevation—and fly east to Marana in two “sections,” two flights of two aircraft. Cruising at about 240 miles per hour, they would cover the 212 miles in about fifty minutes. The first section of two Ospreys would carry Marine infantry—affectionately known as “grunts”—plus enlisted crew chiefs. There would be eighteen grunts in the lead Osprey and three crew chiefs, one of them a MAWTS-1 instructor, Gunnery Sergeant James Sharp, flying to evaluate the two crew chiefs from the MOTT in that aircraft. The second Osprey would carry fifteen troops and two crew chiefs. The two Ospreys in the second section would carry only two crew chiefs each, no troops. When they got to Marana, the first two Ospreys would land and unload their troops while the other two Ospreys circled five miles to the southwest at about 1,000 feet. As the infantry organized the role players at the airfield for “evacuation,” the Ospreys that had brought them would take off and join the other two in their holding pattern. On getting a call from the ground that the “evacuees” were ready, the two Ospreys that had flown to Marana empty would land and pick up the Marines, then all four Ospreys would fly back to Yuma.
On its face, the mission for the Ospreys was routine: fly from one hard-surfaced runway to another, then back; no dusty landing zone to set down in, no heaving ship deck to land on in the dark. Night missions didn’t get much simpler, and the crews would be wearing the newest generation of night-vision goggles, devices that amplify natural light invisible to the naked eye. Night-vision goggles had vastly improved since 1980, when the clumsy, eye-straining first generation of such devices had caused vertigo in pilots flying the ill-fated hostage rescue mission in Iran. These new goggles, AN/VIS-9s, were lightweight and compact, the size and shape of a small pair of binoculars. Attached to the front of the crews’ helmets so their tubes hung 18 to 22 millimeters from the user’s eyes, the goggles would let the crews see in the dark, turning the world outside their cockpits into a video-game monochrome of dark green and white. The goggles almost turned night into day, though that could be deceptive. Using them, the pilots would have to fly differently than in daylight, for the goggles would cut their field of view from 188 to 40 degrees. That would limit their depth perception, making it harder to judge distances and speeds. They would need to spend more time with their heads “inside the cockpit,” relying on instruments to tell them how far and fast they were traveling, rather than flying by feel. The Osprey cockpit was equipped for this. Instrument readings would be projected on a glass Heads Up Display in front of each pilot, visible through the goggles. Each pilot could call up a moving digital map on a display in front of him by punching a button. To see other things inside the cockpit, the pilots would have to peer under or to the side of their goggles, but the eight MOTT pilots had used night-vision goggles often before. As usual, they also would navigate by instruments to checkpoints along the way, flying to specific altitudes over specific locations at specific times.
Each checkpoint would be easy to see on the digital map. From a cruising altitude of 9,500 feet, they would descend to a checkpoint at 5,000 feet as they neared Marana, then to one at 3,000 feet above sea level, putting them about 1,000 feet over the ground. As the second section of Ospreys took up their orbit there, the lead section would descend to another checkpoint 500 feet above th
e ground, then another at 300 feet. At that altitude, two miles from the airfield, they would tilt their rotors up into helicopter mode to land. Hitting every checkpoint would all but guarantee a safe landing. The flying should be simple.
Tonight, however, the pilots would have a lot of other things on their minds as well. Major Anthony J. “Buddy” Bianca, thirty-three, a former CH-53E helicopter pilot who was one of the MOTT’s relative newcomers, had as much to think about as any. Bianca would copilot the lead Osprey but play two other roles as well. As assault flight leader, he would be mission commander for the four Ospreys. In that capacity, Bianca had planned the operation with his counterparts from the helicopter and fighter plane units taking part, and he would have to keep track of where all the aircraft in the exercise were at any given time. He also would be a student that night, working toward the coveted MAWTS-1 weapons and tactics instructor designation. In that capacity, Bianca would be evaluated during the flight by his Osprey’s pilot, Major James M. “Lefty” Wright, a WTI graduate as a CH-53E pilot. Wright was scheduled to join MAWTS-1 as an Osprey expert after OPEVAL. The copilot of the lead section’s “Dash Two,” as Marines call the second aircraft in a section, also would be a student that night. Major Chucky Gruber would be evaluated for his WTI designation by his Osprey’s pilot, Major Boot Brow, who had been a MAWTS-1 instructor when he flew KC-130 tankers. All eight pilots also would be required to write an evaluation the next day of how the Osprey had performed as a machine that night.
The Dream Machine Page 34
