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WHEN THE MARINES decided to buy a helicopter-airplane hybrid “tiltrotor” called the V-22 Osprey, they saw it as their dream machine. The tiltrotor was the aviation equivalent of finding the Northwest Passage: an aircraft able to take off, land, and hover with the agility of a helicopter yet fly as fast and as far as an airplane. Many predicted it would reshape civilian aviation. The Marines saw it as key to their very survival.
By 2000, the Osprey was nine years late and billions over budget, bedeviled by technological hurdles, business rivalries, and an epic political battle over whether to build it at all. Opponents called it one of the worst boondoggles in Pentagon history. The Marines were eager to put it into service anyway. Then two crashes killed twenty- three Marines. They still refused to abandon the Osprey, even after the Corps’ own proud reputation was tarnished by a national scandal over accusations that a commander had ordered subordinates to lie about the aircraft’s problems.
Based on in-depth research and hundreds of interviews, The Dream Machine recounts the Marines’ quarter-century struggle to get the Osprey into combat. Whittle takes the reader from the halls of the Pentagon and Congress to the war zone of Iraq, from the engineer’s drafting table to the cockpits of the civilian and Marine pilots who risked their lives flying the Osprey—and sometimes lost them. He reveals the methods, motives, and obsessions of those who designed, sold, bought, flew, and fought for the tiltrotor. These stories, including never before published eyewitness accounts of the crashes that made the Osprey notorious, not only chronicle an extraordinary chapter in Marine Corps history, but also provide a fascinating look at a machine that could still revolutionize air travel.
- Sales Rank: #349577 in Books
- Published on: 2011-05-17
- Released on: 2011-05-17
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.44" h x 1.20" w x 5.50" l, .90 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 464 pages
From Booklist
A feast for the more advanced student of military and current affairs, this is the story of the star-crossed V-22 Osprey. The hope of the U.S. Marines for preserving their vertical envelopment capability, that fact alone made the Osprey the target for the marines’ enemies in the Pentagon. It also attracted mountains of negative publicity for its accident record as the developers struggled to perfect an entirely new system for combining vertical takeoff and landing capabilities with high speed in horizontal flight. This involved technological breakthroughs—and also a number of fatal crashes. Still demanding careful maintenance, the Osprey is now in service in Iraq and has the potential to serve not only the marines but also, in time, civilian short-haul airlines. --Roland Green
Review
“[A] book that takes off like a novel and flies like a well-sourced historical investigation.” —Gretel C. Kovach , The San Diego Union-Tribune
“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
“A wonderful combination of personal drama, technological detective story, military history, and . . . a valuable and engrossing book that will be read for many years to come.” —James Fallows, The Atlantic Monthly
“The definitive biography of this embattled bird’s troubled development and initial deployment. Whittle weaves an engrossing tale as much about people as about this complex machine.” —Lee Gaillard, Raleigh News Observer
“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
“The long, costly, and bloody tale of this hybrid bird, which has taken thirty years . . . to go from blueprints to battlefield. . . . A great yarn for those in love with military gee-whiz technology and aviation.” —Mark Thompson, Washington Monthly
“A gripping tale of the development, near-death, and final redemption of one of the most controversial and fascinating aircraft ever flown.” —Air & Space magazine
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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 the 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.
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.
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.
© 2010 Richard Whittle
Most helpful customer reviews
79 of 80 people found the following review helpful.
Cuts through the hype and the hysteria
By Michael Hirschberg
Richard Whittle began covering the V-22 Osprey program in 1984 as the Pentagon correspondent for The Dallas Morning News. Based on hundreds of interviews, extensive research, first hand flights, and an "embedding" on the first Osprey combat tour in Iraq, Whittle's book, The Dream Machine: The Untold History of the Notorious V-22 Osprey provides impressive insight into the internal and external politics of fielding the Marine Corps' "Number one aviation priority."
If you are looking for a technical discussion of the V-22, or a critical assessment of its combat capabilities, or cost-benefit analyses to a conventional helicopter, this book is not for you. Rather, this book is for members of the general public who automatically associate words like "death trap" and "widow maker" with the Osprey.
Neither unrealistically extolling the aircraft's virtues nor carping on capabilities for which it was never designed, the story focuses on the struggles to convince the Army, Navy and Marine Corps that tiltrotor technology was mature enough for development, to design an aircraft to meet the overly-constrained JVX government specification, to maintain support and funding within the Department of Defense and Congress for three decades, and to survive the tragic crashes in 1992 and 2000. Indeed, Whittle has written the first in-depth look at the history of the Osprey that tries to cut through the hype and the hysteria that has surrounded the V-22 for over a quarter century.
Written in a journalistic style, the book covers much of the history of the development of the aircraft, and follows the careers of several key individuals. As a result, although there are hundreds of individuals mentioned at Bell and Boeing, in the Defense Department, Congress, etc, the reader gets a slice - rather than a comprehensive view - of the development challenges. The book reads well, despite a few editing shortfalls, and through Whittle's engaging writing style, the book is hard to put down.
Despite the seemingly pejorative title, Whittle's story is largely a positive one of the trials, tribulations, tragedies and triumphs of the Osprey. Webster's gives the definition of `notorious' as "generally known and talked of; especially widely and unfavorably known." An unfavorable view of the tiltrotor is still probably the "conventional wisdom" among the American public, helped by "60 Minutes" and Mark Thompson's appallingly misguided October 2007 TIME magazine article, "V-22 Osprey: A Flying Shame" - perhaps the low point of journalistic coverage of the Osprey. Whittle's book may serve as a counterbalance, providing enough factual information on the Osprey for readers to draw their own conclusions on the aircraft. An alternative title might have been "Chasing a Dream: The V-22 and How It Got That Way." In fact, Whittle seems to go out of his way trying to incorporate the views of some critics, but in the end, it was a bit unconvincing for me, because the preponderance of the book refuted their arguments.
The retrospective of the entire Osprey development history provides some interesting insights - perhaps unintended by Whittle. For instance, the cancellation of the program by then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney - and the fits and starts of trying to continue the program through Congressional actions - are implicated in the July 1992 crash that killed seven at Quantico Marine Corps Base, and perhaps even lead to rushed developmental testing and the April 2000 crash that killed 19 at Marana. Cheney's cancellations certainly added years and hundreds of millions of dollars to the development; it wasn't until after the crashes that pauses could be made in the program to fix larger problems. Secretary of the Navy John Lehman's insistence on a Firm Fixed Price bid for Full Scale Development and the 50/50 partnership between Bell and Boeing (with neither company in charge) were also root causes of development troubles.
The book also highlights Representative Weldon's role in leading the defense of the Osprey in the Congress, where he formed the "Tilt-Rotor Technology Coalition." After the tragedy of the 1992 crash, Weldon testified that "in the past three years alone we have had nine accidents with the existing medium lift aircraft for the Marine Corps, most recently in March, where fourteen young Marines were killed when the CH-46 helicopter they were flying in went down."
Since its return to flight in 2002, the Osprey has flown well over 70,000 hours, including over 11,000 hours in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. In March 2007, General James Conway, Commandant of the US Marine Corps, in discussing the Osprey's first deployment into combat is quoted as saying, "I'll tell you, there's going to be a crash. That's what airplanes do over time. We're going to have to accept that when it happens." The first combat loss of the Osprey occurred on April 8, 2010 (US time) - 10 years to the day from the crash in Marana - an Air Force CV-22 crashed in southern Afghanistan. The Dream Machine is dedicated to those "who lost their lives developing the V-22 Osprey, and to their loved ones and friends."
25 of 27 people found the following review helpful.
A family members review
By Bernie Lomax
Since most of the reviews so far seem to be from people with a vested interest in the aircraft itself, I thought it appropriate to include one from somebody on the other side of the aisle. My brother was one of the Marines in the Marana crash so this aircraft has been a major part of my life for the last 10 years. That being said I think it is important to remember that this is a review of the book, not our personal opinions of the Osprey itself.
I personally think the book is well written and reminiscent of Jon Krakauer's style. At times it was a bit wordy and I felt he could have tightened it up, but factually the book is very well researched and laid out. I don't know that I would go so far as to say it was "completely unbiased" but I think overall the author does a pretty good job staying neutral.
Regardless of your opinion on the Osprey program going forward, I think this is a good representation of the history to this point. There has been a lot of media propaganda from both sides and this book effectively cuts through most of that to get the story across. I would recommend reading it but be warned, the in depth detail of the crashes can be pretty intense to anyone with connections to the victims.
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
Will resonate for aviation enthusiasts and engineers
By M. Hodies
This book is a good read for anybody who spent some time working on this program in any capacity or for anyone that truly enjoys how aviation comes together (or perhaps how it cannot come together). As someone who worked on this program for several years, it was a great trip down memory lane. I was surprised to see how well insulated I was from the politics, and ego battles going on in senior management with respect to the design of the V-22. The old adage of too many cooks spoiling the soup is incredibly applicable to development of the Osprey. I should not be amazed (but I was anyhow) at the the number of design decisions where the VP/Director with 35 years of experience trumps a great engineer with 25 years of experience just because the VP/director has a big ego and wants to put his stamp on the program. There are a number of other power brokers from both the contractor and customer sides who also make unilateral decisions in the areas of requirements definition and budgeting. I sure hope weapon systems are developed a bit better nowadays....for the sake of my tax dollars.
Whittle's characterizations of the engineers and the facts seem to be fairly accurate. He did a good amount of research by interviewing a lot of the key folks who made an impact on the program. The book starts out a bit slow but once the XV-15 comes along, it starts to become very fascinating and revealing.
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