The Dream Machine Read online

  PRAISE FOR RICHARD WHITTLE AND THE DREAM MACHINE

  “[A] book that takes off like a novel and flies like a well-sourced historical investigation.”

  —Gretel C. Kovach, The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Whittle skillfully depicts the evolution of the aircraft from drawing board to reality. A military version of Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “It’s a great yarn for those in love with military gee-whiz technology and aviation.”

  —Mark Thompson, Washington Monthly

  “By recounting the story of the Marine Corps’ … devotion to the Osprey through years of catastrophic mishaps, budgetary obstacles, and political hoops—not to mention lost lives—Whittle has told the most instructive tale of the way things are done in Washington in some time. Anybody interested in modern government, modern politics, and modern military policy—and would like to find the three in one fascinating pack-age—will read The Dream Machine with pleasure and profit.”

  —Philip Terzian, The Weekly Standard

  “What makes The Dream Machine interesting is the light it sheds on Washington’s ‘permanent government,’ the lobbyists and consultants and bureaucrats and contractors … One of the lessons of Whittle’s book is that no one misses a chance to swim in the giant pool of money and power that is the nation’s capital, where the defense industry is the biggest fish of all.”

  —Matthew Continetti, The Washington Post Book World

  “Tom Wolfe would probably have forgiven … Whittle if he had called this aviation history The Rotor Stuff, since its narrative style is as readable as Wolfe’s chronicle of the jet pilots who crossed the frontiers of ‘mach shock’ to enter the vacuum of space. Read this book. It is more than a valuable aviation history; it is a reminder of the human toll the technological revolution exacts while simultaneously promising future compensation in the very same currency.”

  —Col. David H. Gurney, USMC (Ret.), Proceedings

  “Richard Whittle’s chronicle of the development and acquisition of this storied aircraft is destined to become a classic … It may be almost impossible to find a finer work.”

  —Col. Will Holahan, USMCR (Ret.), The Officer

  “Whittle says his goal in writing about the Osprey was ‘simply to tell its story, good and bad, and let the facts speak for themselves.’ He has succeeded.”

  —Steve Weinberg, Dallas Morning News

  “Drawing on more than 200 interviews, Whittle reconstructs the Pentagon strategy sessions and covert Capitol Hill meetings that kept the Osprey going despite crashes, production delays, and billion-dollar cost overruns… . a fine book.”

  —Dale Eisman, The Virginian-Pilot

  “Whittle takes the reader behind the closed doors of the military-industrial complex and into the cockpits of the Ospreys that went down, telling a story as gripping as it is important.”

  —Aviation Maintenance

  Whittle “pulls no punches, but takes no cheap shots either. The result is a truly readable book that spins a fascinating yarn of science, politics, and intrigue.”

  —Military.com’s “Line of Departure”

  “Meticulously researched … an inside look at the mind-bogglingly complex Pentagon procurement system.”

  —Nathan Hodge, Wired’s “Danger Room”

  “An engineering saga and a guide to the technical intricacies of Pentagon politics.”

  —Ben Steelman, Star-News (Wilmington, NC)

  “That the Osprey was able to survive as a program is one of those true stories that one simply could not make up … Whittle brings us to the back rooms and briefing spaces where the debate and infighting actually took place. He sheds light on the myriad little known facts that constitute the Osprey’s story and does not shy away from the controversies.”

  —Col. Bill Powers, USMC (Ret.), Marine Corps Gazette

  “The Dream Machine is a wonderful combination of personal drama, technological detective story, military history, and vivid explanation of major issues affecting America’s military and economic future. This is a valuable and engrossing book that will be read for many years to come.”

  —James Fallows, Atlantic Monthly, and author of National Defense

  “A fascinating, inside history of the most controversial airplane in the past quarter century. Whittle presents an even-handed description of the promise and dangers in the new, new military flying machine that may shape the future of commercial aviation.”

  —Bing West, New York Times bestselling author of

  The Village and The Strongest Tribe

  “In this compelling and important book a real reporter’s reporter asks all the hard questions and refuses to settle for any of the easy answers. Whittle has solved the real-life mystery of the raging, twenty-five year battle the Marines waged to get the V-22 Osprey. You owe it to yourself as a reader and as a citizen to read The Dream Machine.”

  —Mark Shields, syndicated columnist and PBS Newshour political analyst

  “The Dream Machine is the gripping story of the quest for the Osprey, an ideal flying machine that transfixed the aviation world and eventually cost billions of dollars and dozens of lives. Like the helicopter-airplane that tantalized generals, engineers, and pilots for decades, The Dream Machine is also an irresistible hybrid—a cross between The Soul of a New Machine and Black Hawk Down.”

  —Brad Matsen, former aviator and New York Times bestselling author of

  Titanic’s Last Secrets and Jacques Cousteau: The Sea King

  “Meticulously researched and tautly written, Richard Whittle’s The Dream Machine expertly weaves telling technical details with heart-stopping human drama into a riveting, fast-paced history of one of the military’s most controversial war machines, the V-22 Osprey.”

  —Eric Schmitt, terrorism correspondent, The New York Times

  Simon & Schuster Paperbacks

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  Copyright © 2010 by James Richard Whittle

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Paperbacks Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  First Simon & Schuster trade paperback edition May 2011

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  Text designed by Paul Dippolito

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows: Whittle, Rick.

  The dream machine : the untold history of the notorious V-22 Osprey / Rick Whittle.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  1. V-22 Osprey (Transport plane)—Design and construction—History.2. V-22 Osprey (Transport plane)—Testing—History. 3. Convertiplanes —United States—History. 4. United States. Marine Corps—Procurement. I. Title. TL685.W46 2010

  623.74'65—dc22 2009026071

  ISBN 978-1-4165-6295-5

  ISBN 978-1-4165-6296-2 (pbk)

  ISBN 978-1-4165-6319-8 (ebook)

  This book is dedicated to the civilians and Marines who lost their lives developing the V-22 Osprey, and to their loved ones and friends.

  JULY 20, 1992, QUANTICO, VIRGINIA

&nbs
p; Gerald W. Mayan

  Robert L. Rayburn

  Anthony J. Stecyk, Jr.

  Patrick J. Sullivan

  Major Brian J. James

  Master Gunnery Sergeant Gary Leader

  Gunnery Sergeant Sean P. Joyce

  * * *

  APRIL 8, 2000, MARANA, ARIZONA

  Aircrew

  Lieutenant Colonel John A. Brow

  (posthumously promoted)

  Major Brooks S. Gruber

  Staff Sergeant William B. Nelson

  Corporal Kelly S. Keith

  Infantry

  3rd Battalion/5th Marines:

  Second Lieutenant Clayton J. Kennedy

  Sergeant Jose Alvarez, Jr.

  Corporal Adam C. Neely

  Corporal Can Soler

  Lance Corporal Jason T. Duke

  Lance Corporal Jesus Gonzales-Sanchez

  Lance Corporal Seth G. Jones

  Lance Corporal Jorge A. Morin

  Lance Corporal Kenneth O.Paddio

  Private First Class Gabriel C. Clevenger

  Private First Class Alfred Corona

  Private First Class George P. Santos

  Private First Class Keoki P. Santos

  Private Adam L. Tatro

  Marine Wing Communication

  Squadron 38

  Corporal Eric J. Martinez

  * * *

  DECEMBER 11, 2000, NEW RIVER, NORTH CAROLINA

  Lieutenant Colonel Keith M. Sweaney

  Lieutenant Colonel Michael L. Murphy

  (posthumously promoted)

  Staff Sergeant Avely W. Runnels

  Sergeant Jason A. Buyck

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  CHAPTER ONE: The Dream

  CHAPTER TWO: The Salesman

  CHAPTER THREE: The Customer

  CHAPTER FOUR: The Sale

  CHAPTER FIVE: The Machine

  CHAPTER SIX: Young Winston’s Osprey

  CHAPTER SEVEN: One Period of Darkness

  CHAPTER EIGHT: Survivability

  CHAPTER NINE: Another Period of Darkness

  CHAPTER TEN: You Want It Bad, You Get It Bad

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: The Dark Ages

  CHAPTER TWELVE: Phoenix

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note and Acknowledgments

  Sources

  Interviews

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  PROLOGUE

  “A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.”

  -DEATH OF A SALESMAN, BY ARTHUR MILLER, 1949

  Where he was and what he was doing when he first heard the news is seared into Dick Spivey’s memory. The disaster took place in the desert near Marana, Arizona, at two minutes before eight o’clock in the evening, local time, on April 8, 2000. Spivey’s brain stores that data alongside November 22, 1963, and September 11, 2001, in the lobe reserved for devastating events. “For me, that’s the same kind of thing,” Spivey explains in a native Georgia drawl seasoned with an acquired Texas twang.

  When it happened, Spivey was 5,300 miles and seven time zones away from Marana, lying in bed in his room at the Thistle Hotel Victoria in central London as the sun rose. Barely awake, he was listening to, but not watching, a morning television news broadcast. The Thistle Victoria, a somewhat timeworn but convenient pile of stone and faux marble attached to the city’s throbbing Victoria Station rail terminal, is mostly an affordable place to flop for tourists. Spivey, a fifty-nine-year-old aeronautical engineer-turned-marketer for Bell Helicopter of Fort Worth, Texas, was there because the hotel was the site of an aviation conference that Monday. He and a U.S. Marine Corps general were to speak there about a peculiar aircraft Spivey had helped sell the Marines on two decades earlier. It had been the service’s top priority ever since.

  The aircraft was the V-22 Osprey “tiltrotor,” called that because it tilts two giant rotors on its wingtips upward to take off and land and swivels them forward to fly fast. The tiltrotor was Bell’s solution to an engineering challenge that had tantalized inventors and engineers and industrialists and the military since the 1920s: how to build a vehicle able to take off, land, and hover with the agility of a helicopter yet fly as fast and far as an airplane. Spivey had had a hand in designing the tiltrotor in his engineering days. Since becoming a marketer in the 1970s, he had promoted it to anyone who would listen. But Dick Spivey was not just a salesman with a product, he was a salesman with a dream. Spivey expected the tiltrotor to change the way people fly as much as the jet engine had—and the jet engine had changed the world. That’s what Dick Spivey told people all the time, and that was what Dick Spivey believed.

  By the spring of 2000, the Osprey was nine years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. Its developers had been whipsawed between technological hurdles and political interference. They had struggled with manufacturing problems. They had been undermined by business rivalries and their own overly ambitious promises. They had been emotionally scarred and financially stung by an epic political battle in Washington over whether to build the Osprey at all. After they had won that fight, the Marine Corps had pressed relentlessly to get the Osprey into service. Now, at last, everything seemed to be on track. The Marines were practicing mock missions with the Osprey as a prelude to fielding it as a troop transport in 2001. The general with Spivey would tell the conference about that. Spivey planned to talk about an even more audacious tiltrotor he and others at Bell had been working on—a tiltrotor bigger than the military’s bulky C-130 Hercules cargo plane. The designers were calling it the Quad TiltRotor because instead of the Osprey’s two rotors it would have four, mounted on two wings instead of one. The theoretical behemoth would dwarf the V-22, carrying four times the troops and cargo that could fit in an Osprey. Spivey was going to tell the conference all the great things a bird like that could do for the military. If anybody asked, he would also gladly explain how the tiltrotor was not just going to change but revolutionize civilian air travel, too, solving the airport congestion problem by making it possible to fly without runways. In the future, he had no doubt, tiltrotors would carry civilian passengers from, say, the heart of London to the heart of Paris in less time than it took to get from Victoria Station to London Heathrow Airport by train or taxi. Spivey sometimes got so worked up at the prospects he found it hard to sleep at night.

  That morning in London, though, as he lay there drowsily listening to the TV in his hotel room, Spivey heard a news item that jolted him awake. “They were talking about this jet that had crashed in the U.S. and killed nineteen people—a Marine Corps jet,” Spivey recalled. “I had this rush throughout my body thing, but then they called it a jet. I thought, ‘What Marine Corps jet do they have that will carry nineteen people?’ That made me feel better for a few minutes. But then this chill ran through me and I called the general.”

  The general called headquarters in Washington, then rang Spivey back with awful news. The plane that had gone down near Marana a few hours earlier, killing its crew of four and fifteen Marine infantry riding in back, hadn’t been a jet. It had been an Osprey.

  * * *

  Paul J. Rock Jr., a square-jawed, red-haired, tightly wound Marine Corps pilot—radio call sign “Rocket”—was another who would never forget Marana. The “mishap aircraft,” in the dry terminology of military accident investigation reports, was one of four Ospreys taking part in a mock embassy evacuation—the very mission for which Spivey and other believers had long touted the tiltrotor as ideal. Rock, a young major at the time, was copiloting one of two Ospreys trailing two others as they flew to a tiny airfield near Marana, a desert town about twenty-five miles northwest of Tucson. A group of role players were waiting there to be “rescued.”

  After the first two aircraft approached the airfield and tilted their rotors upward to land, a nightmare began. Without warning, the second Osprey snapped into a right roll and plowed into the ground with its belly up. It exploded in a fireball that lit th
e evening sky for miles. Rock saw the orange flames in his rearview mirror as his Osprey circled five miles away. Four of Rock’s squadron mates and fifteen other Marines riding in the back of the Osprey that went down were killed instantly.

  Investigators attributed the crash to “human factors” and the Marines went ahead with their plans for the Osprey. Eight months later, though, Rock lost another four squadron mates when yet another Osprey went down in a boggy forest near their coastal North Carolina home base, New River Marine Corps Air Station. Pentagon officials, who had been expected to approve plans to build 360 Ospreys in all for the Marines, grounded the few already built.

  Four days after the New River crash, Secretary of Defense William Cohen formed a commission to examine whether the tiltrotor—despite decades and billions spent developing it—might in fact be fatally flawed. The panel had barely started its work when a national scandal over the Osprey erupted. The commander of the Osprey training squadron at New River was accused of telling his mechanics to lie about how frequently the aircraft couldn’t fly because of mechanical problems. The Defense Department opened a criminal investigation.

  The crashes, the grounding, and the maintenance scandal disheartened the Osprey pilots at New River. All pilots love to fly. Most pilots live to fly. For the next two years, though, Marine pilots were forbidden to take an Osprey off the ground—or even sit in one and crank the engines. Headquarters Marine Corps was afraid something new might go wrong.

  Reduced to reviewing and revising maintenance manuals, Rock and other Osprey pilots began to fear they might never fly the tiltrotor again—might even be tainted by having flown it at all. Critics were calling the Osprey a boondoggle and a death trap, a “widow-maker.” They said the Marines were foolhardy at best and delusional at worst for wasting so many taxpayer dollars and so many promising lives on such a Rube Goldberg contraption. The Osprey’s foes urged the Pentagon and Congress to destroy the beast before it killed again.

  Rock was a U.S. Naval Academy graduate who planned to make the military his life’s work. He had joined the Osprey program in 1997 full of zest, certain he was at the cutting edge of Marine Corps aviation. He had been proud to fly the most prized aircraft in the Marine Corps stable, an innovative piece of technology expected to revolutionize the way his service fought wars. Yet, after the crashes and the grounding, after attending the funerals of friends and being interrogated about the maintenance scandal by Defense Department investigators, after watching nearly every other pilot in the Osprey squadron transfer out, Rock was demoralized. He thought of asking for a transfer, maybe even resigning his commission.