Issue 13.07 - July 2005
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Saving the Pentagon's Killer Chopper-Plane 

22 years. $16 billion. 30 deaths. The V-22 Osprey has been an R&D nightmare. But now the dream of a tilt-rotor troop transport could finally come true.
By Ron BerlerPage 1 of 5 

Eight RH-53D Sea Stallion transport helicopters lift off in twilight from the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Nimitz in the Gulf of Oman, bound for a makeshift airstrip 600 miles away in the middle of Iran's Dasht-e-Kavir desert. Their clandestine mission, Operation Eagle Claw, is to rescue 53 Americans held hostage in the US embassy in Tehran.

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At the airstrip, codenamed Desert One, six bumblebee-shaped C-130 Hercules transport planes wait to refuel the Sea Stallions. The helicopters are there to carry Delta Force commandos 270 miles to a staging area in the mountains outside Tehran, then raid the embassy the next night. The mission can't proceed any faster. The Vietnam-era Sea Stallions have limited range and cannot refuel in-air.

The helicopters enter Iranian airspace below 200 feet to avoid radar detection. Somewhere over the desert, they get trapped in a large haboob, a storm of dust as fine as talc. Visibility drops to near zero. One Sea Stallion drops out after a warning light flashes. A second reports gyro failure and turns back. A third loses its hydraulic pump. Only five fully functioning helicopters reach the airstrip.

Concerned that the mission is too hobbled to succeed, President Carter orders the team to abort. As the aircraft prepare to evacuate, one Sea Stallion shifts position on the airstrip to allow a C-130 to take off. The pilot lifts off, banks left, and loses his bearings in a welter of dust and downwash. He banks back to the right and collides with the C-130, his rotors slicing into the transport plane's fuselage. Both aircraft burst into flames; eight servicemen die.

The fiasco at Desert One in 1980 highlighted the Pentagon's need to replace its antiquated fleet of transport helicopters. The Sea Stallion and its 1960s-era cousin, the CH-46 Sea Knight, were too slow and, in their old age, had become maintenance nightmares and safety hazards. Incoming Navy secretary John Lehman, a pilot during the Vietnam War, thought he had an answer. When he was working for Henry Kissinger on the National Security Council in the 1970s, he saw photographs of a curious-looking experimental aircraft called the XV-15. It was a tilt-rotor hybrid - equal parts helicopter and plane, able to take off vertically and hover like a helo and then swivel its tilt-rotor pods (called nacelles) forward to fly like a traditional fixed wing.

After President Reagan put Lehman in charge of the Navy in 1981, Lehman traveled to the Paris Air Show to see the XV-15 in action. It wasn't as cool as, say, the British short-takeoff/vertical-landing Harrier jump jet. In fact, it didn't look remotely aerodynamic - more like a moving van stuck between two 38-foot-wide windmills. But Lehman was smitten. "It was very easy to fly," he says, "far more stable than a traditional helicopter, and simpler and safer than a Harrier. I was convinced it was what we needed." Lehman pushed the plane through the Navy's acquisition process.

In 1983, the Navy awarded Bell Helicopters and Boeing Aircraft a $68.7 million joint contract to design an aircraft based on the XV-15. This was the V-22, nicknamed the Osprey. It would carry two dozen geared-up marines or 10,000 pounds of weaponry, fly 2,100 nautical miles at 25,000 feet with just a single, in-air refueling, and land anywhere, no runway required.

At least, that was the theory. It's been 22 years, and the skies aren't exactly crowded with Ospreys. After more than two decades and $16.4 billion, the history of the V-22 is a sorry tale of cost overruns, shoddy construction, and managerial incompetence. Thirty people have died in four Osprey crashes, making the V-22 one of the killingest experimental planes ever. The program has teetered on the brink of elimination since almost the beginning.

But it never went away, propped up by genuine need, pork barrel politics, and the hope that the money already spent wasn't money wasted. Now the weird hybrid plane has entered a critical test phase called operational evaluation - the last hurdle before full production. The Osprey made it to op-eval once before, five years ago, and failed spectacularly. After an intense few years of engineering and test flights, years of tearing the plane apart and putting it back together under a fix-it-or-kill-it threat from the Pentagon, the Osprey is back. At military bases across the country, from New River Marine Corps Air Base in North Carolina to Edwards Air Force Base in California, pilots and engineers are testing the plane under combat conditions: extreme heat and cold, desert sand, high-altitude flying, aircraft carrier takeoffs. If all goes well, the evaluation will end in July and construction of the fleet will begin in 2006, and the first Osprey squadron will fly in fall 2007.

The Pentagon is confident it has a winner. The engineers and pilots believe they have solved the problems, both technological and organizational, that made the Osprey seem like little more than a deadly boondoggle. The Marine Corps has already ordered 360 Ospreys. The Air Force Special Forces is in for 50, and the Navy for 48. Sticker price: roughly $73 million apiece (GlobalSecurity.org, a defense consulting group, estimates the figure is really more like $105 million). "The Sea Knight can fly marines 50 miles from ship to beach, where the enemy is generally waiting," says Marine lieutenant colonel Kevin Gross, a manager on the Osprey team and the program's former flight test director. "With the Osprey, we'll be able to carry them past the beach, around the threat, around the weather, across any terrain, to where the enemy is weakest, where we can dictate the battle."

The V-22 barely survived the 1990s. The cold war was over, terrorism was a distant threat, and military spending was under scrutiny. When the Osprey budget ballooned from a projected $2.5 billion in 1986 to $30 billion in 1988 without a single test flight, defense secretary Dick Cheney tried to zero out the funding. Congress, not the Pentagon, kept the budget at the minimum level. The plane finally flew in 1989, and two years later it had its first crash. On June 11, 1991, an Osprey prototype hovering in helicopter mode - about 15 feet off the ground - wobbled. The left nacelle hit the runway and the plane dropped, bounced a few hundred feet, and burst into flames. The two pilots aboard sustained minor injuries in the accident, which investigators traced to incorrect wiring in a flight control system.

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