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The idea was to build aviation's Holy Grail: An aircraft that could fly like a highly-armed bird -- taking off and landing like a helicopter, soaring with the speed of a fixed-wing aircraft, and carrying an array of missiles and guns. All it took was 25 years, $22 billion, and 30 lives to get it into service. The Dream Machine: The Untold History of the Notorious V-22 Osprey is the meticulously researched story of that
quest. It's also an inside look at the mind-bogglingly complex Pentagon procurement system. Author Richard Whittle, a longtime Washington correspondent for the Dallas Morning News, recently spoke with Danger Room about his newly published history of the controversial tiltrotor.
Danger Room: When it comes to the Osprey, there seems to be no middle ground: Either you love it, and it's the greatest troop transport ever invented, or it's a costly deathtrap dreamt up to keep the defense contractors happy. How did you approach the story?
Richard Whittle: Expecting to get doors slammed in my face and lectured a lot. That didn’t happen much, at least when people let me explain that I didn’t have a dog in this fight. But you’re right. The Osprey comes as close as any defense issue ever to being a religious question. There are true believers, who think the tiltrotor is going to revolutionize not just the way the Marines fight but the way we all fly, and there are true non-believers, who see the V-22 as a boondoggle that should have been canceled long ago. That’s made the debate pretty nasty. One of my goals in writing The Dream Machine was to cut through the hype and hysteria. I just tried to tell the story and let the facts speak for themselves.
Danger Room: The Dream Machine is also a parable of defense procurement. Why is it that machines like the Osprey -- which, at first glance, looks a great idea, but ends up being infernally costly to operate and maintain -- go massively over budget, take decades to complete, and end up falling short of expectations?
Whittle: The Osprey is certainly a poster child for defense acquisition reform. It took 25 years and $22 billion to get it into service, and it’s expected to cost $53 billion to buy all 458 the Marines, Air Force and Navy have in their plans. But those figures say more about what our defense acquisition system can do to even great ideas than they do about the tiltrotor as a way to fly. The tiltrotor is actually a fairly elegant solution to what in the book I call the quest for aviation’s Holy Grail – aircraft that, as one aeronautical engineer put it in the 1930s, can do “substantially everything a bird can do.” Outrageous cost overruns and schedule delays often start when the military tells industry what it wants a piece of equipment to do. Too often, the military shoots for the moon and contractors tell them they can get them there fast, and for a bargain price.
The Osprey was originally supposed to fly ten types of missions for four armed services, carry its own missiles and guns, fly 2,400 miles without refueling, have a cabin pressurized against nuclear, biological and chemical agents -- the list went on and on. It also had to use what at the time were cutting edge technologies, like composite materials instead of metal in the fuselage and “fly-by-wire” electronic flight controls. The Pentagon asked Bell Helicopter and Boeing for a real dream machine, and they said they could build one. But one of the stories I tell in the book is how, when he saw what the military wanted, Bell’s chief tiltrotor engineer threatened to resign rather than design it. He was afraid it was going to discredit the tiltrotor concept.
The defense acquisition system still builds the best weapons in the world. No sane nation wants to go mano-a-mano with the U.S. military. But it often costs way too much and takes way too long to get those weapons. Despite its traumatic first 20 years, which included three crashes that killed 30 people, the Osprey may still redeem itself.
Danger Room: The Marines certainly think so. What is it about the Marines that makes them love ambitious -- some might say outlandish -- technology?
Whittle: The Marines are risk-takers by nature, but as I explain in the book, they’ve been in love with vertical-lift aircraft since the helicopter and the atomic bomb emerged during World War II. They saw very quickly that in the atomic age, it might be impossible to do amphibious assaults -- their trademark mission -- from ships anchored close to a hostile shore, the way they did them in World War II. They fell in love with the tiltrotor because it offered a faster and better way to take Marines to a fight from ships at sea. Their passion for it, though, stems from their unique culture. Unlike the other armed services, the Marines are also a tribe or even a cult, and one of their tribal beliefs is that they have to be different to continue as a separate branch of the military. It’s hard to remember these days, but at various times in their history, the other services and even presidents have tried to abolish the Marines or fold them into the Army or shrink the Corps beyond recognition. Harry Truman once famously said – and later regretted it – that “the Marine Corps is the Navy’s police force.” So for the Marines, the Osprey has been an existential question. That’s why they were willing to pay such a high price in time and money and lives to get it.
Danger Room: Lots of larger-than-life characters make an appearance in The Dream Machine: Charlie Wilson, Curt Weldon, John Tower. Who's the most colorful, and why?
Whittle: Charlie Wilson, without a doubt. I can testify to that because I traveled with him to Islamabad and Peshawar, Pakistan, in 1986, when he was sponsoring the Afghan Mujahedin in their insurgency against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. But as they say in Texas, that’s a whole ‘nother story. Wilson and a lot of Democrats backed the Osprey, but far more important in Congress was Republican Curt Weldon, whose House district near Philadelphia included a Boeing factory that builds half of the V-22. Weldon’s pretty colorful himself. I tried to capture that in the book in telling the inside story of how he and other members helped the Marines and Bell-Boeing thwart Dick Cheney when he was defense secretary and tried to cancel the Osprey to save money.
Danger Room: So the V-22 landed in Dick Cheney's crosshairs, and managed to survive. How did that happen?
Whittle: The Marines did for their allies in Congress what Charlie Wilson did for the Mujahedin. They aided the Osprey camp covertly. After a while, what they were doing was about as “secret” as Wilson’s “covert” aid to the Afghan rebels, but the Marines were careful to keep the details of what they were doing from getting to Cheney. It drove him crazy. Pork barrel politics helped keep the Osprey alive, but what saved it was the fact that the Marines fought for it with the same zeal that got them across all those Japanese-held beaches in World War II.
Danger Room: You traveled to Iraq to fly with the first deployed Osprey squadron. What was your experience flying the tiltrotor in theater?
Whittle: I’d ridden in the Osprey a couple of times before I went, but in Iraq I got to fly in the jump seat between and just behind the pilots, where I could see the cockpit displays. They also gave me a headset so I could hear what they were saying. Flying in the Osprey is a real experience anytime. Once it gets airborne like a helicopter, the pilot or copilot tells the crew, “Ready to go fast,” and turns a little thumbwheel on the control stick to tilt the rotors forward to fly like an airplane. It can convert to airplane mode in about 12 seconds, but even before the rotors get all the way forward, the Osprey takes off like a floored Corvette. Riding in it in Iraq wasn’t much different from flying in it elsewhere, except that a crew chief fired some rounds from the machine gun on the back ramp to test it after we took off. In theory, there was a chance somebody would shoot at us, but peace had broken out in Al Anbar province at the time – this was December 2007. Besides, while helicopters usually fly low in combat zones, the Marines cruise their Ospreys at 8,000 feet or more, well above the range of AK-47s and RPGs. The Osprey gets to that altitude quickly enough that getting shot at wasn’t a great worry when I flew in Iraq. It also gets you where you’re going a lot faster than a helicopter can, and it doesn’t shake and rattle you the way many military helicopters do. I describe my experience and some aspects of VMM-263’s first deployment with the Osprey, including some amusing ones, in the final chapter of the book.
Danger Room: Recently, the Osprey had its first combat loss. How big of a setback is it for the program? Or has it, as the Marines argue, proven out in combat?
Whittle: This may not be that big a setback, because it’s the first Osprey crash in a decade. Another thing that isn’t widely appreciated is that Osprey was redesigned and retested after the three fatal crashes during its development that made it notorious. I tell the stories of those crashes and what caused them in great detail in the book, but I also tell what was done to make the Osprey safe afterward, when the Pentagon finally decided to do it right instead of in a hurry.
The Ospreys the Marines and Air Force are flying in Afghanistan today are much better than the early versions flown 10 years ago, and before this recent crash, they had logged more than 11,000 combat flight hours without a serious mishap. The Osprey that went down in Afghanistan was an Air Force CV-22, as they call their version, carrying Army Rangers on a special operations mission. Very few details have been released, except that an Air Force pilot, an Air Force flight engineer, an Army Ranger and an unidentified civilian were killed. My sources say there were as many as 16 survivors, which seems to indicate they were close to the ground when they crashed. If that’s so, it’s worth noting that a Pentagon study last year found that the U.S. military lost 227 helicopters in Iraq and Afghanistan between October 2001 and September 2009 at a cost of 364 lives. Many of those crashes were caused by “brownout” landings, in which the rotors kick up so much dust the pilot loses sight of the ground.
The Marines have been flying a dozen Ospreys in Afghanistan since November, and they’ve done missions where they were shot at but missed with AK-47s and RPGs. It’s still too early to say they’ve proven the Osprey in combat, though. Given the high price they paid to get it, and how much it still costs to buy it and fly it, I expect the debate is far from over.
[IMAGE: Simon and Schuster]
