The Dream Machine Read online

  In 2001, like the Ospreys in the Arizona desert and the North Carolina woods, Paul Rock’s career and Dick Spivey’s dreams lay in ashes.

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  In October 2007, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Rock led the first squadron of V-22 Ospreys ever to fly actual military operations into Iraq, where a U.S.-led invasion four years earlier had ignited ethnic and religious blood feuds and an insurgency that had taken thousands of lives. By then, the bitter debate over how the war had begun was largely over. It was hard to remember why the war’s sponsors had thought it would be so easy, and so cheap in dollars and lives, to change the world.

  The war in Iraq was a fitting stage for the Osprey’s combat debut— a project sold for a mission once deemed existential, a venture begun under the influence of a dream that soon became a nightmare. The Osprey and its first war had much in common.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE DREAM

  The contract bid consisted of thousands of pages of text and graphs and charts, along with engineering drawings, illustrations, and mathematical equations bristling with Greek letters. These were the days before you could put such a thing on computer disks, and it was printed on about a thousand pounds of paper, organized in dozens of beautiful, shiny white binders. The shiny white binders filled about thirty cardboard boxes. Not too bulky for a plan to create an aeronautical dream machine, perhaps, but a heck of a load for one man. Even so, Dick Spivey decided to deliver it to Washington, D.C., himself.

  Delivering contract bids wasn’t Spivey’s job at Bell Helicopter, where he had worked since his freshman year in college, in 1959. Skinny but athletic back then, in this winter of 1983 Spivey was bald and a touch overweight. He had turned forty-two the previous December 6, just two weeks after getting remarried. Only a few years earlier, to the great relief of friends and co-workers, he’d finally given up the shaggy red wigs, gold chains, and pastel leisure suits he’d worn during his disco days. Spivey’s appearance and dress now were more in keeping, some felt, with what he was: an accomplished aeronautical engineer, owner of a patent on a special type of helicopter rotor blade he’d designed during his first twenty-four years with Bell. These days, however, Spivey was primarily a marketer and salesman, and he had been marketing and selling this proposal for years now. If Bell and its partner on the project won the contract, it had the potential to gain them a whole new market beyond helicopters—a market potentially worth billions of dollars. That could secure Bell’s future for decades. Spivey, though, wanted to take the proposal to Washington himself because this project promised to make a dream that had become his obsession a reality. Those binders held a plan to build the U.S. military an aircraft like no other, a machine whose ability to swivel two wingtip rotors upward or forward gave it an astounding characteristic. Spivey often described it in sales pitches by holding his arms at his sides and pointing his index fingers skyward while explaining that this tiltrotor, as the aircraft was called, “takes off like a helicopter.” Then he would rotate his arms and fingers forward and add: “Flies like an airplane.” The tiltrotor was a hybrid, designed to combine the vertical agility of a helicopter with the speed of an airplane. Unlike helicopters, whose top speed—and thus range—is severely limited by the aerodynamics of their fixed rotors, the tiltrotor would transform itself in flight, using its rotors as propellers to fly nearly as fast and far as a conventional turboprop airplane. Unlike airplanes, however, the tiltrotor would need no runways or big-deck aircraft carriers to take off and land.

  Under government contracts, Bell had built and experimented with two small tiltrotors for three decades, working out most of the basic engineering problems. Spivey had chipped in on the design of the second one. The tiltrotor Bell and the Boeing Vertol Company were proposing to the military in those shiny white binders, however, would be far larger than those experimental models, which had carried only a pilot and copilot. This tiltrotor was going to be big enough to carry two dozen troops four times as far at twice the speed and twice the altitude of a standard troop transport helicopter. With no troops or cargo to carry, it was going to be able to fly more than two thousand miles on a tank of gas or nearly unlimited distances with aerial refueling. Building it would be one of the most daunting engineering challenges Bell had ever faced. Even Boeing Vertol, a division of the aerospace giant Boeing Company, would find its part of the project demanding. If the military proved the technology valid on such a scale, though, Spivey had no doubt that a new age in aviation would dawn, one in which civilians would demand to fly in such dream machines, too. The vexing problem of airport congestion would be history. Travelers would flit from city to city without wasting the time and enduring the annoyance of slogging their way to and from and through airports, except to make long-distance trips by jet. Small towns in remote areas would enjoy regular air service without building runways. Tiltrotors would pick up passengers from heliports, riverside piers, maybe even shopping center parking lots and comfortably whisk them most any place they needed to go. And Dick Spivey would have helped make that dream a reality.

  Spivey was far from the first to be seized with such visions. An aircraft with the tiltrotor’s advertised abilities had been one of the great technological dreams of aviation since the earliest days of powered flight. The dream was potent. It had inspired individuals and energized institutions for decades. A long line of inventors, engineers, entrepreneurs, industrialists, and military strategists had theorized, discussed, designed, and tried to build similar aircraft for generations without ever quite pulling it off. Some had run through their personal fortunes pursuing the idea. Scores of designs had been floated; dozens had been built, then abandoned for one reason or the other. The quest had been aviation’s equivalent of the search for the Northwest Passage.

  It began as a search for perfection. After the Wright brothers inaugurated the era of powered flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in December 1903, aviation became the new frontier. The sky was enticing virgin territory for men and women infected with a passion for discovery but born too late to help fulfill the nation’s Manifest Destiny. These aviation pioneers were out to do more than just fly; they intended to conquer the air every bit as much as their pioneer forebears had conquered the West. For the most idealistic, that meant fixed-wing airplanes were just a start. Dr. Alexander Klemin, the highly respected chairman of the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aeronautics at New York University, described the challenge in testimony to the U.S. House Committee on Military Affairs in April 1938: “The conquest of the air in its broadest sense will only come when we can do in the air substantially everything that a bird can do in the air. The airplane with all its marvelous achievements cannot possibly give us such complete mastery of the air.”

  Doing “substantially everything a bird can do” meant being able to take off and land just about anywhere, plus—ideally—being able to hover. While the airplane had become commonplace by the time Klemin gave that testimony in 1938, no one in the United States had yet managed to build a useful helicopter, meaning one that could rise more than a few feet off the ground, hover stably, and fly under control. Indeed, many in aviation viewed the various inventors working on helicopters as hopeless romantics. Only two years earlier, no less an authority than Orville Wright had dismissed such efforts as futile, judging that “the helicopter type of aeroplane offers several seemingly insurmountable difficulties.” Yet the most ambitious dreamers were already trying to design aircraft that would fly like an airplane and a helicopter combined. Such a machine would rise vertically, convert in midair to horizontal flight, then convert back to land, so in time, they came to call these dream machines “convertiplanes.”

  Convertiplanes would do away with the airplane’s need for long runways or aircraft carriers with catapults and arresting gear, the dreamers promised, because they would fly instead from downtown rooftops, the decks of small ships, maybe even a good-sized backyard. The most utopian enthusiasts envisioned a convertiplane in every garage. They urged convertiplane desig
ners to add “road-ability” to their concepts. “A vehicle that can take you from your home to your office, to your country club, to your bank or to your friend’s house, by air or by road, whichever is most convenient, will have a vast usefulness,” test pilot James G. Ray told a Philadelphia aviation conference in October 1938. “It will become a competitor of the automobile. Such a machine can and will be built.”

  One dreamer who shared that vision was Gerardus Post Herrick, known as Gerard, whose obituary in the September 10, 1955, New York Times noted that he was the “generally acknowledged father of converti-planes.” In a 1943 article for the magazine Mechanix Illustrated, Herrick shared his notion of how convertiplanes were about to change the world: “Little Jimmie Jr. looks up from his 1950 Model tricycle toward a tiny speck just above the horizon. He watches intently as it streaks nearer at more than 6 miles a minute, then he calls, ‘Hey, Dad! Better get the lawn mower out of the way—Ma’s coming in for a landing!’ ”

  A bald, bespectacled, bow-tie-wearing lawyer and engineer who had graduated from Princeton University in 1895 at age twenty-two and New York Law School two years later, Herrick was bitten by the aviation bug not long after the Wright brothers flew. While serving as a captain in the Army Air Service during World War I, his interest “crystallized into a desire to see if I could not use my own special training and experiences and resources to assist in perfecting flight,” he later recalled. After studying the matter to see where “improvement was most needed,” Herrick decided to concentrate on safety. He reasoned that “for a large proportion of the public to take up flying they would have eventually to be convinced of its safety and reliability.” His first thought was to try designing a helicopter, but then he concluded he could get “perhaps 90 percent” of the still-theoretical helicopter’s safety and convenience by simply adding a rotor to a fixed-wing airplane.

  Airplane wings and rotor blades are both airfoils—material forms with a curved top and a relatively flat bottom that create lift or thrust when air flows over them. A conventional airplane’s wings generate lift as the craft’s propellers or, since the 1940s, jet engines pull or push the wings forward into the air. To keep its wings lifting, though, an airplane has to maintain a minimum speed in flight; otherwise it can stall or spin out of control. Here rotors offer an advantage: their blades travel in a circle, creating thrust, and therefore lift, whether the rotor is moving forward or not. Thus the helicopter’s ability to hover. A rotor has its limitations, too, of course. A rotor that descends fast enough to start ingesting its own turbulent downwash can stop producing enough thrust to provide lift. A rotor, however, also can generate lift even if no engine is powering it, if it keeps turning and descends with sufficient speed. The force of the air flowing up through the rotor will cause the blades to turn and create lift on their own.

  Spanish engineer and inventor Juan de la Cierva was one of the first to decide that adding a rotor to an ordinary airplane could make it safer, a goal he set for himself in 1919 after a trimotor plane he had designed stalled and crashed. Four years later, Cierva flew and patented his “Auto-giro.” The machine had a small fixed wing under the fuselage, or in some later models no fixed wing at all, and a propeller on its nose for forward thrust. What made it an Autogiro was an unpowered, freewheeling rotor over the pilot’s head to provide most or all of the lift. This “rotating wing,” as rotors are often called, worked like the sail of a windmill, turning as it was hit by the relative wind created when the aircraft moved forward. (Relative wind is an aeronautics term for the air that flows over an airfoil or aircraft in motion.) Its rotating wing’s lift allowed Cierva’s Auto-giro to take off within 200 to 300 feet, depending on the actual wind, and to land in a space the size of a tennis court. In theory, that made the Autogiro far safer than the airplane. Even if the engine failed, relative wind and inertia would keep the rotor whirling, providing enough lift to feather the Autogiro to earth, much as a spinning maple seed falls. This method of landing is called autorotation.

  The Autogiro’s rotating wing, though, also added greatly to the aircraft’s drag, or wind resistance, making it far slower than an airplane and causing it to burn more fuel. Nor was it able to hover, since its rotor was unpowered. American convertiplane inventor Gerard Herrick’s initial idea, which he once said came to him before he was familiar with Cierva’s Autogiro, was that a powered rotor would lift his machine into the air like a helicopter. Then a special mechanism would stop the rotating wing in mid-flight, converting the rotor into a fixed wing and the aircraft into a biplane. To land or to fly at speeds so slow as to nearly hover, the pilot would release the rotor so it could spin again. After studying the matter in depth in the 1920s, however, Herrick concluded that building a plane that could take off and land like a helicopter required too much “radical development.” He decided instead to focus on devising a hybrid craft with an unpowered rotor that either could be locked in place or released to spin freely in the wind. Herrick saw this as the way to combine the airplane’s speed with the Autogiro’s slow landing ability. This “convertible” would take off and fly like a biplane but release its rotating wing in midair to fly slowly or land. The inventor initially called his design the “Vertaplane,” or sometimes “Vertoplane.” It quickly became his dream machine, a project that absorbed his energies and finances until his death thirty years later.

  Herrick worked on his concept for a year with help from Alexander Klemin and others at the Guggenheim School of Aeronautics, then in 1930 formed the Vertoplane Development Corporation of New York. With his own money, he had a Chicago company build him a full-sized monoplane with a 24-foot, mast-mounted wooden rotor on top. On November 6, 1931, he and pilot Merrill Lambert took the new HV-1 Vertaplane to a field near Nile, Michigan, about twenty-five miles east of Lake Michigan, to test it.

  With the upper wing locked in the biplane position, Lambert taxied a bit just to make sure the rudder pedals worked, then took off and flew at low level for three or four minutes to check the other controls. He landed, then took off again, and flew another fifteen minutes at a few hundred feet. So far, so good: he could control the plane, it was stable, and he could maneuver it well. He and Herrick agreed to continue. Using a special starter, Lambert set the rotary wing spinning and taxied down the field about 300 feet, resisting the plane’s urge to take off. Then he let it hop into the air a few times, just ten to thirty feet, but cut the engine and let the Vertaplane feather down in a short, steep landing. It worked just fine. Lambert took off and flew down the field one more time at about ten feet to make sure he had enough control with the rotor spinning. He did. Next he tested the upper wing release mechanism in a few taxi runs to make sure the rotor would start turning when the wind hit it. It did. Now Herrick and Lambert decided to see if the Vertaplane would live up to its name.

  With the upper wing locked in biplane position, Lambert took off and climbed to 4,000 feet. He wanted enough altitude to bail out if something went wrong. It did. When he released the rotor, it turned a few times, then teetered violently, clipping the propeller in front and the tail fin in back. The Vertaplane went out of control. As it plunged toward the ground, Lambert managed to scramble out, but his parachute didn’t open. Merrill Lambert became the first man to die trying to make a convertiplane work.

  With the tunnel vision that so often accompanies obsession, Herrick treated Lambert’s death not as a tragedy casting a shadow over his quest but as an inconvenience in figuring out how his invention had malfunctioned. “Unfortunately the pilot’s parachute failed to open, although he succeeded in getting clear of the ship, and our analysis of the cause of the accident had to be made solely upon the basis of an examination of the plane,” Herrick wrote in 1933 to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. “This was rendered comparatively easy, because of the fact that the machine was practically intact,” he reassured the panel. A year earlier, only two months after the crash and no doubt shaken by what Lambert’s death might do to his invention’s image,
Herrick had been downright duplicitous about what happened that day at Nile. In an article for Aviation Engineering magazine describing the flights and the crash, Herrick noted that the final flight was at 4,000 feet so that if “something should go wrong, the pilot could take to his parachute.” Herrick omitted any mention, however, of what happened when Lambert did, leaving the reader to assume the pilot had bailed out safely.

  The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, or NACA, created in 1915, was the forerunner of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA. Herrick was asking the agency to let him use a full-size wind tunnel—one able to hold an entire aircraft—to test a new Vertaplane he had built since Lambert’s demise. He explained in his application that “I have expended between forty and fifty thousand dollars and between five and six years on this work and find myself obliged to at least slow down if not temporarily stop the work, due to the fact that I have no more available present resources, partly due to the present financial situation, for going ahead without some outside assistance.”

  The “present financial situation” was the Great Depression, which was holding back other aviation dreamers as well, and leading many to seek government contracts, often without success.

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  When Dick Spivey flew to Washington in 1983 to deliver the Bell-Boeing tiltrotor proposal to the Naval Air Systems Command, he was treading what by then was a well-worn path. Since World War II, the military’s special needs, massive budgets, and lack of a profit motive have made it a driving force behind new technology—especially in aviation. “You can’t make a business case to develop a risky plane from scratch just for the commercial world,” Spivey once explained to me. “It takes a long time to develop an airplane, and in the commercial world, you don’t get any money until you sell the first airplane. In the military, you get progress payments. They create the leading-edge technologies because it’s too risky for commercial ventures. The military has been a source of what we call ‘patient capital.’ They were willing to put money into a program in order to advance technology that might be an advantage on the battlefield.”