From the moment they began their tardy descent to the moment Brow’s aircraft hit the ground, exactly two minutes and twenty-six seconds had elapsed.
* * *
Westman, piloting the lead Osprey of the second section, and Rock, flying copilot in the Osprey behind, saw the explosion in their rearview mirrors, an orange flash that caught their eye under their night-vision goggles. They had just begun a second orbit in the holding pattern they had taken up five miles from the airport. For a few seconds, the radio fell eerily silent. No one wanted to be the first to acknowledge what all four pilots in their two Ospreys knew must be true. Westman looked in the mirror again. Orange and red flames were licking into the night sky from the Marana airfield. For a few seconds, the sight mesmerized him. Then Murphy radioed. Seconds later, the pilots heard Bianca shouting that there had been a crash.
“Holy shit, Pyg, you’re the on-scene commander,” said Westman’s copilot, Schafer, jolting Westman out of his daze. “We need to go over there.”
Schafer took the controls, peeled off toward the airport, and started circling at 1,500 feet as Westman got busy on the radio, directing air traffic. He couldn’t believe this.
Five minutes or so later, Rock got Westman on the radio. “Hey, we probably ought to go back,” Rock said, referring to himself and Murphy. Every pilot in a squadron has responsibilities on the ground. Rock was the MOTT’s safety officer and Murphy its maintenance officer, he reminded Westman. “We need to get back and start making preparations for a mishap investigation.” Westman told them to go.
Murphy banked into a tight turn and started flying back to Yuma— fast. He and Rock didn’t say much on the flight back. From the size of the explosion, it was pretty clear there would be no survivors. They knew they had just lost some good friends.
There would be plenty of grieving to do later, grieving for Brow and Gruber, both of whom left wives and young children, and for the other seventeen Marines who had flown with them. Fifteen were infantry, the backbone of the Marine Corps, all but one serving in the 3rd Battalion/5th Marines at Camp Pendleton in California. The oldest was twenty-nine, the youngest eighteen. On average, they had lived twenty-two years. In the back cabin with them had been two crew chiefs, Staff Sergeant Bryan Nelson, thirty, a mild-tempered Virginian and a talented athlete, and Corporal Kelly Keith, the twenty-two-year-old who liked to sing “Let Her Cry,” by Hootie and the Blowfish. Some MOTT mechanics would mourn later by getting forearm tattoos depicting dog tags with Nelson’s and Keith’s names and their dates of birth and death. One had an Osprey tattooed on his back, along with the title of a Kid Rock song the maintainers listened to a lot after the crash. It was called “Only God Knows Why.”
* * *
By the time Rock and Murphy got back to Yuma, MOTT leaders Sweaney and Shaffer were at the hangar, organizing the thousand things that needed doing. By 10 P.M., Westman and Schafer had returned, after handing off air traffic control at Marana to the commander of MAWTS-1, who had arrived by helicopter. Not long afterward, Sweaney came into Westman’s office and told him, sounding astonished, “It’s already on CNN.”
“If it’s on CNN, we’d better start notifying family members,” West-man said. Wives and other relatives would be burning up the phone lines, calling each other and anybody else they could reach to find out what had happened. Those who didn’t get a call might assume the worst. No use putting anyone through that.
Sweaney hesitated. It was the middle of the night back home. West-man could see Sweaney was stinging inside. Sweaney had been through something like this before, at Quantico in 1992, when the fourth Osprey prototype crashed into the Potomac River. Sweaney, a captain back then, had helped pull bodies out of the river. Now he was a lieutenant colonel, and the MOTT’s commander. His shoulders were broad, but the weight on them was crushing.
* * *
It was CNN’s reporting that jolted Dick Spivey out of bed at the Thistle Victoria Hotel in London, where it was already Monday morning, and seared the moment into his memory. Spivey was to brief an aviation conference that day on the Quad TiltRotor, the bigger dream machine he was now promoting full-time. The news that an Osprey had crashed and killed nineteen Marines hit him like a punch in the gut. His stomach was grinding. He felt anguish for the Marines and their families. He felt angst for the Osprey. He wanted to crawl back into bed and go back to sleep, try to turn this nightmare back into the dream the tiltrotor had always been for him. What could have caused such a thing? he wondered. A screw-up like the crossed wires that caused Aircraft 5 to crash at Wilmington in 1991? Design weaknesses like the ones that brought down Aircraft 4 at Quantico in 1992? Pilot error? Spivey started to call Fort Worth to see what he could find out, then remembered what time it was in Texas. Way too early to call. All he could do for now was remind himself that bad things happened in aviation. Nearly every kind of helicopter or airplane crashed at some time or another for some reason or another. The old saying was true: “The history of aviation is written in blood.”
* * *
As the MOTT’s safety officer, the first thing Rock had to do when he and Mike Murphy landed back at Yuma was file various reports with MAWTS-1. When that was done, Rock and Murphy gathered up a “mishap kit” of crash investigating gear. Those sifting through the wreckage of Brow’s Osprey at Marana would have to wear Tyvek suits, gloves, and respirators to protect them from the toxic fumes created by burning composites and fuel. Rock and Murphy gave teams of enlisted Marines orders and sent them to Marana in some pickup trucks the MOTT had rented for transportation in Yuma. Then the two pilots threw the mishap kit in the back of a rented Dodge Ram and started the 220-mile trip to Marana themselves. Before speeding out of Yuma on Interstate 8, they stopped at a convenience store and bought five boxes of PowerBars and some water for the Marines at the crash site. It was going to be a long night.
When they arrived, it was after midnight. The fire was out but the remains of the Osprey were smoldering next to the runway. The local fire department had gotten to the scene twelve minutes after the crash but the wreckage was still too hot to go near. There was nothing anyone could do for the nineteen Marines who had been on board. Their Osprey had hit the ground with what investigators later estimated was twentyfive times the force of gravity. The impact literally crushed the life out of the young men inside.
* * *
The morning after, some of the MOTT pilots gathered in Sweaney’s office to listen on a speakerphone when Lieutenant General Fred McCorkle, the deputy commandant for aviation, called. McCorkle’s call sign was “Assassin,” and for many in Marine Corps aviation, the three-star general was a paragon, a walking icon of what an assault support pilot should be. Born in 1944 in San Francisco but raised in the Smoky Mountains town of Harriman, Tennessee, McCorkle never lost the hillbilly drawl and grammar that came with his roots, though he earned a degree in education from East Tennessee State University in 1966. He joined the Marine Corps out of college and two years later was in Vietnam, a jutjawed, wiry little first lieutenant flying CH-46 helicopters with enough abandon to earn the radio call sign “Crazy Fred.” McCorkle flew 1,500 combat missions and had several helicopters shot from under him in Vietnam. He won a raft of medals, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross twice, the Legion of Merit four times, and a Purple Heart, among others. Before his tour in Vietnam was up, his squadron mates changed his call sign to Assassin.
Over the next two decades, McCorkle attended all the right Marine Corps schools and held all the right commands, including two years as commander of MAWTS-1. As he rose through the ranks, McCorkle collected protégés, younger officers who had caught his eye for one reason or another. When he was commanding MAWTS-1, or Marine Aircraft Group 29 at New River, or later the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing at El Toro, California, McCorkle often could be found at the officers club on Friday nights, having drinks with his “sons,” as he called them. They listened and he talked, schooling them in aircraft and tactics, telling war stories, making wry comm
ents in his folksy manner. They loved him. When something bad happened to one of his sons, McCorkle was there to help. McCorkle hadn’t known Keith Sweaney very long, but since OPEVAL had begun, the general had come to count the lieutenant colonel as one of his sons. Now Sweaney needed a shoulder to lean on.
As a mentor, McCorkle was calling the day after the crash to buck Sweaney up. As the head of Marine Corps aviation, McCorkle was assessing how the crash might affect the Osprey. He wanted OPEVAL done so the Osprey could pass its “Milestone III” review—the decision on Full Rate Production—by the end of 2000. As a young major in the 1980s, McCorkle hadn’t been in favor of the Marine Corps building a tiltrotor to replace the CH-46; he thought a new helicopter made more sense. Once the decision to build the Osprey was made, though, McCorkle saluted and supported it like a good Marine. As he rose in rank over the years, McCorkle became impatient to see the Osprey get into service. The Corps’ CH-46 fleet was becoming more fragile all the time; Marines died in CH-46s nearly every year, it seemed, but the Marines never got the Osprey. Politics was the main reason, in McCorkle’s view. In 1996, when he was a two-star general, McCorkle grew more impatient with the wait for the Osprey after he went to Fort Worth and flew the XV-15. He was amazed at how stable the little tiltrotor demonstrator was in flight. Later he flew the Osprey itself and became a tiltrotor convert. McCorkle had been a true believer in the Osprey and its potential for the Marines ever since, and he thought it was way overdue. McCorkle wanted to field the Osprey as soon as possible. That meant getting it into Full Rate Production, and that meant finishing OPEVAL.
Westman was leaning in the doorway as Sweaney and McCorkle talked on the speakerphone. “Keith, I know this is tough, and we’ve got everything down right now,” McCorkle said. “We’ll get this thing figured out, but all you guys have to do is tell us when you’re ready to go flying and I’ll get you back in the air.”
“Who the fuck’s he think’s gonna fly ’em?” Westman blurted, loud enough that he figured McCorkle might have heard him. Westman didn’t care. “I was convinced at that time that we needed to know why that airplane crashed before we went and hopped back in it and started again what we were doing,” he told me.
* * *
Three days after the crash, McCorkle came to the Pentagon press briefing room to give the media the first of what he promised would be regular updates as the investigation into what had happened at Marana progressed. In the three days since the crash, public affairs officers at Headquarters Marine Corps had gotten more than a thousand calls from reporters. “Right now we have no indication of what caused the accident,” McCorkle said. “I’ve heard on a number of news [reports] that we were looking at pilot error. We are not. We’re looking at anything that caused the accident, whether it’s material, whether it’s mechanical, or whether it was human factors– related. And right now we have none of that information.” McCorkle stiffened a touch when a reporter asked if he’d heard that the parents of some of the infantry killed were saying the Marines had used their sons as “guinea pigs” in a test aircraft, a machine that “was unsafe and their child had communicated that to them.” The Ospreys at Marana were “in no way test aircraft,” McCorkle said; they were production models the Marines would be flying in operational squadrons for years to come. He had flown the Osprey himself, and his confidence in it was unshaken. “I consider this to be the best aircraft that I’ve ever been in. This accident, to me, is not going to do anything to our MV-22 program,” McCorkle said. No Ospreys, including the prototypes assigned to developmental test pilots at Pax River, would fly for now, but McCorkle was sure they would soon. “There’s no doubt in my mind whatsoever, you know, that the full rate of production decision will be made with Milestone III and that it will go through.”
* * *
For the first time since 1992, the Osprey was front-page news again, and the news was awful. Most coverage simply reported what was known so far about the crash, but some articles and commentaries took the Marines to task for putting troops in the back of an aircraft seen by outsiders as exotic and experimental. Three days after McCorkle briefed the press, the New York Times editorial page urged Defense Secretary Cohen to “appoint a panel of independent experts to review whether the Osprey is as mechanically sound and militarily advantageous as its champions assert.” Others called for an end to it. “The V-22 Osprey is a misbegotten aircraft that tends to destroy itself,” an editorial in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel declared. “It is the result of a perverse decision-making process that led to a wasteful and disastrous boondoggle.” Denouncing the Osprey as “pork-barrel politics gone berserk,” the commentary concluded that, “The V-22 program should be killed before it kills again.”
The Marines, Bell-Boeing, and the Osprey’s allies in Congress knew this was a crisis that could quickly get out of hand if they didn’t handle it correctly. There always had been a lot of people who wanted to kill the Osprey, from those who coveted the billions being spent on it for their own pet Pentagon projects or domestic programs to those who thought the tiltrotor was just a crazy idea, a Rube Goldberg contraption foisted on the Marines by greedy defense contractors. The Osprey lobby, relatively quiet for years, rushed to circle the wagons. Representative Curt Weldon, the Pennsylvania Republican who had led the fight against Dick Cheney’s attempt to cancel the Osprey a decade earlier, held his own news conference. “It’s a terrible tragedy for those Marines and their families, but we’ve had seven years of unblemished success since the last accident,” Weldon told reporters. “I have total confidence in the program.”
Nine days after he first talked to reporters about the crash, McCorkle was back in the Pentagon briefing room. Since the last time he had been there, McCorkle had attended funerals for Brow and Gruber, two more of his “sons.” He had also gone to Yuma to talk to engineers examining the wreckage of their aircraft and to give the MOTT a pep talk. McCorkle addressed the unit in Toad Hall, an auditorium in MAWTS-1’s headquarters building named for former Navy Secretary John Lehman, who had set the Marine Corps off on its quest for the Osprey seventeen years earlier. “Toad” had been Lehman’s call sign as a Naval Reserve helicopter pilot. As Navy secretary, Lehman had gotten MAWTS-1 the funding for its building.
Speaking from the Toad Hall stage, McCorkle told the MOTT’s pilots and maintainers they needed to look beyond the crash, pick up the pieces, and go on. He told them about some of the times he’d been shot down flying CH-46s in Vietnam. He talked about how many buddies he had lost in crashes over the years. Theirs was a dangerous business, McCorkle told them. There would be other times when airplanes would go down, other times when friends and brother Marines would be lost. As he looked out over his audience, McCorkle could see a few faces that wore thousand-yard stares, guys who looked depressed. He tried to shake them out of it. “If you’re not ready to get back in this aircraft tomorrow and fly,” he told them, “you’re probably in the wrong business.”
The remark rankled more than a few of the pilots and maintainers. They were still mourning their fallen friends, and they still didn’t know what had caused the crash, why those friends had died. Some knew McCorkle was only trying to motivate them, but his bravado left a sour taste in a lot of their mouths. “Okay, well, we must be in the wrong line of business,” Staff Sergeant Julius Banks told a couple of his friends as they filed out of the meeting. Major John T. Torres, one of the pilots, felt the same way. “Well, I guess I shouldn’t be part of this program, because I’m not ready to get back into that plane and do the things I need to do,” Torres told others in the MOTT that day.
Sweaney called a meeting of the MOTT after McCorkle left Yuma. Despite what the general had said, “Take as much time as you need,” Sweaney told his unit. “If you’re not comfortable getting back on the aircraft, that’s your personal call.”
At his Pentagon news briefing on April 20, McCorkle told reporters that in the days since he had last talked to them, the commandant, General Jones, had attended a mem
orial service at Camp Pendleton for the infantry killed at Marana, then joined him in Yuma to meet with engineers studying the debris for clues to the cause of the crash. The Osprey’s flight data recorder had been recovered. Its information was being retrieved and it would be plugged into a flight simulator for study. The cause should be determined before too long. “We’re still looking at maintenance, we’re looking at mechanical, and we’re looking at human factor,” McCorkle said. Once the cause was identified, McCorkle said, test pilots at Pax River would start flying Osprey prototypes again. Once General Jones agreed it was safe, the Marines would start flying their Ospreys, too, at first without passengers. The commandant wanted to fly on the first one to carry passengers, as did McCorkle. In the meantime, the MOTT would do OPEVAL tasks on the ground, such as testing the Osprey’s redesigned blade fold/wing stow mechanism. “If we don’t have a major delay here, the OPEVAL will stay right on schedule,” McCorkle said. “We have to be done with OPEVAL, as most of you-all know, by June the thirtieth.”
* * *
McCorkle was in a good mood when he returned to the Pentagon press briefing room next, on May 9. As he took the podium, he bantered with reporters he knew. The deputy chief of staff for aviation had reason to be cheerful. He was there to confirm, as CNN had reported five days earlier, that the crash investigators had found nothing wrong with the Osprey. “The commandant is confident that our MV-22 Osprey aircraft are fully airworthy,” McCorkle said. Flights by test pilots at Pax River would resume the next day. The MOTT would fly again soon. OPEVAL would be done in time for a Full Rate Production decision in the fall.
The Dream Machine Page 36
