* * *
Pete Aldridge was impressed by the Osprey’s flight tests, but nothing was going to change Harry Dunn’s mind. During the past two years, Dunn had never stopped trying to shoot the Osprey down. Nor had he given up on Aldridge, despite the scolding e-mail Dunn sent in 2001 after Aldridge ignored his advice to cancel the Osprey without further testing. Presumably encouraged by Aldridge’s public comments in 2002 expressing doubts about the Osprey, Dunn resumed his one-way correspondence with him that year. By then, Dunn had plenty he wanted to share. While mining for data that might prove the Osprey was the Albatross he called it, Dunn had struck a rich vein. He had found a “mole” at Navair, a Marine with access to a senior officer’s computer, who began feeding Dunn a steady diet of internal documents. They created special e-mail accounts to communicate with less risk of being detected, and there was seemingly no limit to what Dunn’s mole could provide.
Flight test plans, PowerPoint slides shown by Navair and Bell-Boeing engineers at technical reviews, Navair messages reporting inspections of new Ospreys when the government accepted them from Bell-Boeing, biweekly status reports on every Osprey at Pax River and how much it was flying—it all landed in Harry Dunn’s e-mail inbox. If a windshield on an Osprey at Pax River cracked, if an oil pump failed, if a fire extinguisher in the cabin discharged accidentally, Dunn knew about it nearly as soon as Colonel Dan Schultz did. Dunn passed some documents on to favorite reporters, but he largely used his trove of inside information in writing “Red Ribbon Panel” reports for Aldridge. Dunn seemed to think about how he might influence Aldridge around the clock. One day at 7:13 a.m. he sent Aldridge an e-mail saying he had been up since 4 a.m. “trying to find best approach to alert you and offer a suggestion or two.”
Aldridge, however, had long since stopped reading Dunn’s e-mails, and on May 20, 2003, Dunn learned that his efforts to sway the under-secretary had failed. Dunn got word that at a Defense Acquisition Board meeting that day, Aldridge had announced he was satisfied with the Osprey’s flight tests and would sign an Acquisition Decision Memorandum recommending the Pentagon buy more Ospreys each year than the existing annual limit of eleven. Aldridge, who once had described himself as the Pentagon’s greatest skeptic on the Osprey, was giving it his seal of approval. Dunn had stuck a few harpoons into his Moby Dick over the past two years, and left some scars, but his best chance to kill it—if such a chance ever existed—had passed.
Dunn e-mailed Aldridge a protest the next morning, telling him that “my 30 years of support to your career” had been a “gross mistake.”
Aldridge didn’t reply, but he explained his decision two days later at a Pentagon news conference—held the same day he retired, at age sixty-four. The Osprey hadn’t fully proven itself, Aldridge told reporters, but the flight tests at Pax River, while still incomplete, had changed his mind about its vulnerability to vortex ring state and erased his doubts about its agility over a landing zone. “They have demonstrated very high rate of descent at slow forward speeds,” Aldridge said. “They know the envelope in which the vortex ring state condition exists.” Navair had put visual and verbal warning devices in the cockpit to alert pilots when they were verging on vortex ring state, he noted. The flight manual limit on the Osprey’s descent rate still would be no more than 800 feet per minute at 40 knots or less, but “we know we can fly the airplane at twice that number, twice the sink rate, and much slower, and still not enter vortex ring state.” Aldridge was equally enthusiastic about the Osprey’s ability to maneuver over a landing zone while under fire. By tilting its rotors, he said, the Osprey “can accelerate out of the landing zone faster than any helicopter.” The flight tests had shown that the Osprey could do sharp maneuvers too, he said. “That, to me, has demonstrated a certain amount of operational suitability that we had not appreciated in this airplane back when it started the flight test program,” Aldridge said.
Reporters in the Pentagon briefing room were stunned by Aldridge’s conversion. “A year of closely monitored flight testing has led to a reversal of fortune for the V-22,” Aviation Week reported in a story on his decision. “Testing, including more than 460 flight hours, has won over at least those critics that matter.” The headline on the story read MORE PHOENIX THAN OSPREY.
* * *
Major Paul Rock was a faithful Catholic, and by May 2003, he felt as if he had spent two and a half years in purgatory. Even after the test pilots at Patuxent River started flying their Ospreys again in May 2002, the Ospreys at VMMT-204 in New River were still grounded. Rock and the handful of others left in the squadron were reduced to trying to keep their eight Ospreys in good mechanical shape without flying them. Taxiing them near the hangar or sitting in the cockpit and running the engines was as close as they got to putting an Osprey to use. Rock’s main project was even less thrilling: supervising mechanics as they found and corrected what turned out to be more than thirty thousand errors, inaccuracies, and other deficiencies in the electronic maintenance manual Bell-Boeing had provided with the Osprey. By temperament, Rock was well suited to the task. He was meticulous in everything he did, and a congenital record keeper. He kept a diary, akin to his detailed flight logbooks, in which he recorded every new beer he tasted. Sorting out the errors in the maintenance manual, though, was boring compared to flying. Rock had made his own bed when he decided to stick with the Osprey while most of his peers left VMMT-204 for other assignments, but it was hard to lie in it. When the alarm clock went off some mornings, Rock dreaded getting up. He dreaded reading about the Osprey in the newspapers, too. Nearly every article seemed to portray it as a multi-billion-dollar boondoggle the Marines were just too proud, too callous, or maybe too stupid to abandon. Rock seethed at that. The crashes in 2000 and the investigation of the maintenance scandal at VMMT-204 in 2001 were the lowest points, but another came in mid-2002, when the new deputy commandant for aviation came to visit.
Lieutenant General Michael A. Hough was fifty-seven and on the verge of retiring when General Jim Jones asked him to take over Marine Corps aviation instead. Jones thought Hough had the right stuff to make sure the Osprey got back on track and to defend the Corps in negotiations with the Navy on restructuring naval aviation. Hough—who pronounced his name “how”—wasn’t the typical Marine general. He was a “mustang,” slang for an officer whose career began in the enlisted ranks. A Wisconsin plumber’s son, Hough had dropped out of the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse during his freshman year to work and help his family after his father was diagnosed with cancer, then went into the Navy. High scores on his entrance tests got him into the service’s nuclear power program but Hough quickly concluded that enlisted life was “a slow boat to nowhere.” He applied for a program that allowed sailors to get into the Naval Academy and graduated from Annapolis in 1969.
Hough took his commission in the Marines so he could fly and became an F-4 Phantom fighter pilot. After a dozen years of flying, he held jobs working on budget and procurement issues at Navair, at Headquarters Marine Corps, and elsewhere in the Pentagon. He also became a general, and by 2002, few of his Marine Corps peers knew as much as Hough did about weapons buying. For two years before he became deputy commandant, Hough ran a program to develop the Joint Strike Fighter, a new jet to be built in three variants, including a version that could take off and land vertically. The job required technological and political savvy. The Marine Corps, the Navy, the Air Force, and maybe a dozen foreign allies were to buy the JSF, making the project worth perhaps $300 billion. Hough owed his success in managing a hard-fought competition for the right to build the plane between defense giants Boeing and Lockheed Martin partly to experience, partly to intellect, and partly to political smarts. He also owed it to his personality.
Mike Hough was a red rubber ball of a man—colorful, bouncy, amusing, irreverent. Scarlet-cheeked, he had crafty eyes and an unpretentious manner that endeared him to officers and civilians who worked for him. He could be hard on defense contractors, and he could speak acr
onym-larded contracting jargon with the best engineers and bureaucrats. He more often spoke in the vernacular, though, and listening to him could be like watching fireworks, a dazzling display of metaphors and similes. After the Osprey crashes in 2000, Hough once told me, a lot of people in the Pentagon and even the Marine Corps “just wanted to get the booger off their finger.” Praising a former subordinate’s feel for the legislative process, Hough whispered that the man “knew how the sausage was made.”
Hough saw the task of rehabilitating the Osprey not just as an engineering and management challenge but also a political and public relations problem. By July 2002, when he became deputy commandant, test pilots at Pax River were flying the Osprey again, but Aldridge, members of Congress, and the bulk of the news media seemed to be waiting for it to fail. Hough wanted to avoid any incident that might give the critics new ammunition. The Marine Corps’ Ospreys already were grounded, but Hough went further. He barred VMMT-204’s pilots from taxiing their Ospreys, or even cranking up their engines.
Hough’s order was hard to swallow for Colonel Dick Dunnivan and his squadron. It smacked of paranoia, a distrust of the Osprey bordering on shame. It also created a practical problem for Rock, who was in charge of correcting the electronic maintenance manual. The best way to validate many maintenance tasks was to “ground run” an Osprey, but now VMMT-204 couldn’t do that. Rock was finding it hard to keep his enlisted Marines motivated as it was. If they could only look at their Ospreys, not work on them, it was going to be even harder. Dunnivan asked Hough to reconsider. Hough wouldn’t hear of it. The nacelles on the Ospreys at New River hadn’t been modified yet with the new layout of hydraulic lines and wire bundles. Their wire bundles could still chafe their hydraulic lines, which might spring a leak and start a fire. There had been one such incident already. “I’ve got to think about the program,” Hough told Dunnivan. “All we need is something else to happen.”
Not long afterward, Hough came to New River to inspect VMMT-204. He met with Dunnivan and his pilots in the ready room for a couple of hours and found them as gloomy as the gray sky over the base that day. Hough explained why he had barred ground runs. He talked about the road ahead for the Osprey. He told the pilots it would be a long time before they flew one again. Rock asked Hough if he could say how long.
“You guys play golf?” Hough wisecracked. “You’re going to have a hell of a golf game. You’re going to have a lot of time on your hands.”
Rock bristled. “Sir,” he said, “respectfully, your Marines are working very hard here.” Rock saw Dunnivan off to the side, waving his hand across his throat in the “cut” sign, but Rock couldn’t stop himself. “We don’t play golf,” he added tersely.
“Hey, you know, I didn’t mean anything,” Hough said, apparently shrugging off the young major’s petulance. Rock thought he had been tactful. He only realized he’d sounded insolent later, when he got phone calls and e-mails from friends in the Pentagon. “What in hell did you do to General Hough?” they wanted to know.
Hough made another decision a year later that changed Rock’s attitude. By then, Aldridge had given the Osprey his blessing, but before the Marines could field it, the aircraft needed to pass another Operational Evaluation, the tests done in mock missions by military aircrews and known as “OPEVAL.” Congress had written a law in 2001 that effectively required that. Hough decided he needed to “get the Marine Corps’ fingerprints off ” that testing by creating a special squadron to do it, a squadron that reported only to the Navy’s Operational Test and Evaluation Force. That would be more credible, he thought, than a squadron whose Marine pilots also reported up through the Corps’ chain of command. A call went out for Marine Corps, Air Force, and Navy pilots to man the new squadron, designated VMX-22. Rock applied and was quickly accepted.
VMX-22 “stood up” at New River Marine Corps Air Station on August 28 and Hough came down for a ceremony to mark the occasion. When he saw Rock, Hough smiled and said, “Hey, how you doin’? Still not golfing, I guess?” Rock smiled. He was relieved to see Hough had no hard feelings toward him. He was elated when he started flying the Osprey again that fall. Rock was out of purgatory. The Dark Ages were over.
* * *
Rock was one of the few experienced Osprey pilots still available when VMX-22 was formed. Even the test squadron’s commander, Colonel Glenn Walters, had never flown the Osprey before. Walters was a U.S. Naval Test Pilot School graduate who had started out flying AH-1 Cobra gunships. Another Test Pilot School graduate, Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Seymour, an Osprey developmental test pilot since 1995, was VMX-22’s test director, the officer primarily responsible for planning OPEVAL. Rock, Seymour, and former MOTT member Major Anthony Bianca spent much of their first year in VMX-22 just training its other pilots. By the spring of 2004, some still weren’t fully trained, but they were proficient enough to do an “operational assessment,” an initial set of tests to get ready for OPEVAL. The “Dirty Dozen,” as Walters called the cadre who started the squadron, took six Ospreys to Nellis Air Force Base, near Las Vegas, from May 18 until July 9 that year. They flew tests in “austere landing zones,” places where the Osprey’s downwash would kick up a dust or sand storm as it landed.
A couple of months after they returned, Walters called Rock into his office one day and told him to close the door.
“Oh, shit, sir, you’re closing the door,” Rock said. “I must be in real big trouble.”
When Rock left Walters’s office, he was in a daze. He didn’t dare tell any of his friends in the squadron what Walters had just confided because it wasn’t official yet, but he called his wife, Maria, to share the news. Walters had told Rock he’d just received a message from Headquarters Marine Corps. If the Osprey passed OPEVAL the next spring, the Pentagon could be expected to approve Full Rate Production, the long-awaited Milestone III. When that happened, the Corps was going to form an operational Osprey squadron, the first that would field the tiltrotor and fly it in real missions. A selection board had chosen Rock as commanding officer of the unit, which would replace HMM-263, the CH-46 squadron Rock had flown with in the early 1990s. Rock’s new squadron would be designated VMM-263, for Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 263. He would take command when it “stood up” in early 2006. In the meantime, Walters told him, Rock would be transferred to Al Asad Air Base in Iraq to work on the staff of the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing’s forward headquarters there. Rock needed to learn the lay of the land at Al Asad and the intricacies of Marine air operations in Iraq, where the Corps was fighting insurgents in the vast western part of the country, Anbar Province. No final decisions had been made, Walters cautioned, but it was a good bet VMM-263 would be sent to Iraq on its first deployment.
Rock fairly floated out of Walters’s office. Commanding a squadron had been his dream almost since the day he’d graduated from the Naval Academy. Leading a squadron into war would be the ultimate test for a commander.
In March 2005, a month after Rock went to Iraq for his staff assignment, VMX-22 began the Osprey’s second Operational Evaluation, called “OPEVAL II” by some. The Navy’s Operational Test and Evaluation Force and the Pentagon’s Office of Operational Test and Evaluation were going to judge whether the Osprey passed. Walters and Headquarters Marine Corps were determined to do everything possible to make sure that happened, but without risking another disaster. By 2005, sentiment within the Pentagon for killing the Osprey had faded, and any inclination to scrap it on Capitol Hill had evaporated. The Osprey’s public image, though, was much the same as it had been since the 60 Minutes broadcast of January 2001. The Osprey was known as a strange, experimental aircraft that had cost too much and killed a lot of people in crashes. “The American public still didn’t buy it,” Hough recalled. “Everyone was still terrified of it.” Those involved with the Osprey knew there was no chance the program would survive another crash in testing. The mood in the Pentagon and Congress would reverse overnight if that happened. By the nature of OPEVAL, Marines still n
eeded to ride in the back for some of the Osprey’s tests, but Walters decided to reduce the risk by keeping such flights to a minimum.
Over ten weeks that spring, Walters and his pilots flew eight Ospreys in 204 tests, eighty-nine of them realistic mock missions. They flew in the coastal humidity of New River, in the sands of desert ranges at Nellis Air Force Base, in the snow and high altitudes of the Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center near Bridgeport, California, and off the USS Bataan, an amphibious assault ship. The flights included two reenactments of Operation Eagle Claw, the failed Iran hostage rescue mission of 1980, though trouble refueling in midair prevented all of the Ospreys flying from completing either attempt in “one period of darkness.” Rex Rivolo and other critics deemed that a test failure, but Walters and his testers concluded the Osprey could do such a mission in a single night if need be, for a couple of reasons.
The ability to refuel in midair by hooking up to a tanker aircraft is a tricky feat but one that many U.S. military planes and even some helicopters perform routinely to extend their range and payload. Aerial refueling was one of the Osprey’s original requirements, and a task it had been doing since 1998. Pilots of the MOTT flew their Ospreys coast to coast without landing during the original OPEVAL, as Rock and his co-authors had noted proudly in their reply to Harry Dunn published in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 2001. The Osprey was equipped for “probe and drogue” refueling, as opposed to the “boom and receptacle” system favored by the Air Force for its fixed-wing aircraft. In the probe and drogue system, a rigid tube—the “probe”—extending forward from the aircraft needing fuel mates in midair with the drogue, a device resembling a badminton shuttlecock and attached to a flexible fuel hose reeled out by the tanker. This “basket,” as aviators call the drogue, holds the hose steady in flight and helps the pilot seeking fuel guide the refueling probe to its target. Once probe and drogue mate, valves in each open and fuel flows from the tanker to the aircraft needing fuel. During one of VMX-22’s attempts to reenact Eagle Claw, FAA altitude restrictions required the Ospreys to fly between 7,000 and 9,000 feet, where turbulence that day whipped the tanker’s basket around so wildly that only one of the four crews flying could guide their refueling probe into the drogue. A shortage of tankers made it impossible to refuel in midair at the right times in the second attempt. The testers reasoned that if the mission were real, FAA altitude restrictions wouldn’t apply— the Osprey would be able to climb or descend into clean air—and commanders would make sure enough tankers were available.
The Dream Machine Page 47
