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Texas' Deadly $16 Billion Boondoggle
Even Dick Cheney couldn't kill the V-22 helicopter
BY ROBERT BRYCE
ompared
to the V-22, Lazarus was a piker.
Lazarus only rose from the dead once. And it took a special visit by Jesus Christ
to make that happen. The V-22 should have been killed, dead, and buried half
a dozen times by cost- and safety-conscious bureaucrats. And yet, thanks largely
to the Texas Congressional delegation (a group seldom confused with the Christ)
the V-22 continues to stay aloft, gnawing big chunks out of the Pentagon budget.
Not even Dick Cheney, a man who has never been considered anything but a devout
hawk, could drive a stake through the heart of the V-22, even though he spent
his entire tenure as George H.W. Bush’s defense secretary trying to do
just that.
The V-22, also known as the Osprey, continues to feast at the federal trough
despite a cost record that could bankrupt Warren Buffett and a safety record
that would make Evel Knievel pee in his pants. By the end of this year, the
Pentagon will have built about four dozen copies of the exotic tilt-rotor aircraft
at a cost of $16 billion. Out of those aircraft, five have crashed. In fact,
the V-22’s safety record is so bad, Pentagon spokesmen refuse to provide
comprehensive accident statistics on the flying machine. And yet, the V-22—the
biggest waste of defense dollars since the $1,600 toilet seat—continues
to fly.
On
paper, the V-22 looks like a great idea: Marry the vertical takeoff and landing
capability of a helicopter with the speed of an airplane. But making that idea
into reality has been more difficult than finding Osama bin Laden. And despite
nearly 50 years of development work and billions of dollars of investment, the
smartest engineers on earth still haven’t been able to come up with a reliable,
affordable tilt-rotor aircraft.
Four of the first 15 versions of the V-22 ended up in smoldering ruins. Over
the past few years, V-22 crashes have killed 26 Marines and four civilians.
Despite the deaths, the Marine Corps insists that it needs the V-22. In April
2003, Marine Lt. Gen. Emil R. Bedard told a subcommittee of the Senate Armed
Services Committee that the V-22’s “range, speed, payload and survivability
will generate truly transformational tactical and operational capabilities.”
While that might be true, it’s clear that the Marines have embarrassed
themselves in their single-minded pursuit of the aircraft. In 2001, three Marine
officers were implicated in a scheme to falsify maintenance records on a squadron
of V-22s that were being tested in North Carolina in an effort to make the aircraft
look more capable.
The Marines want the V-22 even though it cannot carry as many soldiers as a
modern, medium-lift helicopter; it costs up to five times more than a comparable
standard helicopter; and, thanks to its unusual design, it’s inherently
less safe.
Taken together, all of those flaws should have blown the V-22 out of the sky
a long time ago. And yet, the aircraft is still being produced. This year, the
Pentagon will spend $1.1 billion to build 11 more copies of the V-22. Despite
that cost, despite a myriad of budget battles that it should have lost, despite
a total projected price tag of $43 billion that reeks of pork barrel politics,
despite a belief among some of the smartest people at the Pentagon that the
aircraft can never be made safe, the V-22 continues to thrive. It thrives because
of savvy lobbying by the V-22’s primary producers: Bell Helicopter and
Boeing. It thrives because the Pentagon has been given a no-limit credit card
when it comes to fighting the war on terrorism. But perhaps more importantly,
the V-22 thrives because it is put together at plants in Fort Worth and Amarillo.
And the Texas delegation on Capitol Hill has made certain that those defense
jobs are not lost.
Of course, there’s plenty of pork in the Pentagon budget. But the V-22’s
story is extraordinary by any measure: It has cost more and killed more personnel
than any other aircraft now being developed by the U.S. military. Here’s
how it became one of the most dangerous aircraft in the American arsenal.
arry Bell was
an innovator. By the mid-1950s, the daring designer from Indiana had revolutionized
the aerospace business in both airplanes and helicopters. He had built the P-29
Airacomet, the American military’s very first jet-powered airplane, which
was tested with great secrecy during World War II. He had designed the rocket-propelled
X-1, which broke the sound barrier while being flown by noted test pilot Chuck
Yeager in 1947. He had also designed the Bell 47-B, the first commercially licensed
helicopter. Shortly after getting the 47-B into the market, Bell lent one (along
with a pilot and mechanic) to Lyndon Johnson for his 1948 Senate campaign against
Coke Stevenson. Bell provided the helicopter to Johnson for free.
In
the early 1950s, Bell moved his company, Bell Helicopter, to the outskirts of
Fort Worth and began pursuing contracts with the Pentagon. In 1958, Bell Helicopter
got its first major contract from the U.S. Army for the aircraft that was destined
to become an icon of the Vietnam War, the UH-1, better known as the Huey. That
same year, Bell Helicopter had the first successful flight of an experimental
aircraft known as the XV-3. The company told the Dallas Morning News that it
had “achieved a major breakthrough in aviation engineering” by flying
the world’s first “tilting-rotor fixed-wing aircraft.”
In theory, tilt-rotor aircraft have an advantage that has always been critical
in warfare: speed. Helicopters are tremendously useful machines but compared
to airplanes, they are quite slow. That’s due to the drag created by the
helicopter’s blades. When a helicopter hovers in one place, the rotor blades
push air straight down and therefore create lift in all areas of the blades’
diameter. To make the aircraft go forward, the pilot pushes the cyclic control
forward, which causes the rotor system to tilt forward, thus allowing the aircraft
to begin accelerating. However, as the helicopter picks up speed, the air flowing
over the rotor blades gets imbalanced. The resulting air disturbance begins
to impede the progress of the aircraft and limit its forward speed. Even the
fastest helicopters have trouble reaching speeds of 200 miles per hour. The
tilt-rotor design solves the airflow problem by turning the rotor into a propeller.
(The V-22’s blades are called proprotors.) That allows the aircraft to
turn all of the thrust from the rotor blades into forward thrust, and that permits
the V-22 to fly in excess of 300 miles per hour. The V-22 also claims to have
a range of some 2,500 miles, several times the range of a standard helicopter.
However,
the actual range of the V-22 has been grossly exaggerated. Bell and the Marines
have repeatedly said the aircraft’s “self-deployment range” is
2,500 miles. But it’s only by asking for more specifics that Bell’s
PR people admit that “self-deployment” includes hooking up to a flying
tanker for an aerial refueling. Without refueling, the V-22’s range is
about 590 miles, little better than a standard helicopter. Several modern helicopters
now have ranges of 500 miles or more. And the V-22 refueling issue has not been
fully resolved. The V-22 has not yet been cleared by Pentagon safety officials
for aerial refueling, a fact that the GAO noted in its 2001 report on the airplane.
The Marines have always wanted to move as fast as possible. And given a choice,
they want to do it vertically. That’s why they love the Harrier—the
most dangerous fighter aircraft in existence—and that’s why they love
the V-22. Like the Harrier, the Marines see the V-22 as an aircraft that will
give them greater range of operations and less need for standard airports. And
like the Harrier, the Marine Corps has staked its reputation and committed billions
of dollars by making the V-22 its top aviation priority. In 1991, one active-duty
Marine wrote a report that said the aircraft was “crucial to the Marine
Corps’ over-the-horizon, amphibious assault mission—providing for
vertical envelopment from over-the-horizon distances which will increase amphibious
ship protection and enemy surprise well into the next century.” The Marines
are hoping that the V-22 will replace the CH-46 helicopter, a troop carrier
that has been in use since the Vietnam War.
The Pentagon’s push for the V-22 began in 1981 at the Paris Air Show, when
then-Secretary of the Navy John Lehman saw Bell’s tilt-rotor aircraft and
became intrigued. The Secretary of the Air Force, Hans Mark, who had helped
Bell develop the V-22 prototype while he was director of a research center for
the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, sold Lehman on the aircraft.
Within a few months of Mark’s pitch, the Army, the Navy, and the Marines
were all pursuing the V-22.
In
1982, Bell and Boeing, the Seattle-based aerospace giant, formed a joint venture
to push the new aircraft. In 1986, the two companies were rewarded for their
effort and got a $1.7 billion military contract. The following year, the Pentagon
said it would purchase 913 V-22s at a cost of about $33.2 billion. The cost
per aircraft: $36.4 million. But in 1988, the Army pulled out of the program,
saying the V-22s were too expensive. At that point, the Pentagon reduced the
scope of the program to a total of 657 aircraft: 552 V-22s for the Marines,
50 for the Navy, and 55 for the Air Force.
Then, the V-22 had its first crash landing—on Dick Cheney’s desk.
In 1989, in his first appearance before Congress as George H. W. Bush’s
Secretary of Defense, Cheney made it clear that things were going to be different.
The new defense secretary said that tighter budgets required the Pentagon to
cut wasteful spending. As part of that, Cheney and his boss had agreed to cut
3 percent of the Pentagon budget, or about $9.7 billion, Rather than spend billions
more on the V-22, Cheney said the Pentagon had “opted to stay with established
weapons programs where production lines are operating efficiently rather than
pursue the development of unproven technology.”
Cheney’s budget succeeded in making just about everybody in Texas, and
particularly in Fort Worth, mad. That’s not surprising. At the time Cheney
axed the V-22, only two other cities in America exceeded Fort Worth as recipients
of federal defense dollars. The Pentagon was spending $3.4 billion per year
in Fort Worth—primarily with Bell Helicopter and General Dynamics, which
is now part of Lockheed Martin, the defense giant that builds the F-16 fighter,
the F-22 stealth fighter, and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. As a whole, Texas
was getting more defense dollars than any other state, except for California
and Virginia. (the same statistic holds true today). And Texas politicos were
eager to make sure that the dollars kept flowing. They were joined by powerful
congressmen from Pennsylvania who wanted to make sure that Pentagon dollars
kept flowing to the Boeing plant in Philadelphia, where the V-22’s fuselage
was to be built.
Shortly after Cheney presented his budget, the full House—led by congressmen
from Texas and Pennsylvania—overrode his decision on the V-22 and provided
funding for the aircraft. In 1990, Cheney stuck to his guns and again refused
to put any money in his budget for the V-22 and instead asked Congress to appropriate
money for a cheaper medium-lift helicopter, one capable of carrying about two
dozen personnel. Congress reversed Cheney again, and authorized over $600 million
for research and building of the V-22. Congress also prohibited the Pentagon
from using any research and development funds on any aircraft that might replace
the Osprey. The same scenario played out in 1991, with Cheney asking that no
money be spent on the V-22 and Congress reversing him.
In
April of 1992, Cheney laid out his opposition to the aircraft in a letter to
House Speaker Tom Foley. He said that while the V-22 has “some capabilities
not found in less expensive alternatives, the increased capability is simply
not affordable.” Cheney pointed out that building six copies of the V-22
would cost $2.8 billion, which was $2 billion more than Congress had authorized
for the project. Instead of being lauded for pointing out the obvious, Cheney
was threatened with a lawsuit, by—who else?—a group of congressmen
headed by Texans. Shortly after he sent his letter to Foley, Texas Democrats
Sen. Lloyd Bentsen and U.S. Rep. Pete Geren of Fort Worth and other V-22 backers
threatened to take Cheney to court if he didn’t start spending the money
they’d allocated for the V-22. About that same time, the House Armed Services
Committee, which included three members from Texas and two from Pennsylvania,
voted to fund the Osprey. It added another special provision to make sure that
Cheney got the message: For each month that Cheney refused to provide funding
for the Osprey, the staff of Cheney’s Pentagon comptroller would be cut
by 5 percent.
Three months later, in July of 1992, Cheney capitulated. But Dick Cheney is
a stubborn man. And he made it clear that despite Congress’s view on the
topic, he still hadn’t changed his mind on the value of the tilt-rotor.
In a letter to Senate Majority leader George Mitchell, Cheney said, “If
the V-22 was unaffordable in 1989, it is even more unaffordable now…. I
remain convinced that we can find lower cost alternatives to satisfy the needs
of the armed forces for a medium-lift aircraft.” Cheney agreed to provide
the funding for the V-22 but he also said that he wanted work to begin on an
alternative, less expensive helicopter. In addition, he said that the final
decision on whether to go forward with the Osprey should be decided by a future
Congress. As soon as Cheney’s letter was written, Texas politicos sprang
into action.
Chief
among the lobbyists was Texas governor Ann Richards. She was helped by the change
in administrations. As a candidate, Bill Clinton worked to differentiate himself
from George H.W. Bush by making it clear that he supported the V-22 project.
So, in early 1993, Richards flew to Washington to meet with Pentagon officials
to make sure that they were going to continue funding the program. After meeting
with new Defense Secretary Les Aspin in February of 1993, Richards told reporters
that she was “sure glad to have someone in that office who is a friend
of the V-22.” Richards made another trip to Washington a year later, to
make sure that the V-22 was still on schedule. She met with the new defense
secretary, William Perry, for more than three hours to talk about the project.
She also met with Navy Secretary John Dalton, a man Richards described as “an
enthusiastic supporter of the V-22.”
Throughout the latter part of the 1990s, with Richards’ pal Clinton in
the White House, the V-22 was able to avoid most of the budget fights that had
plagued it during the tenure of George H. W. Bush. Part of that was due to the
fact that one of Bell’s lobbyists during that time was a certain former
governor from Texas.
Shortly after the 1994 election, in which she was defeated by George W. Bush,
Richards decided to follow the paved-with-gold revolving door and become yet-another-politician-turned-lobbyist.
In 1996, Bell’s parent company Textron paid her $80,000 to work on its
behalf. For the next few years, work continued on the V-22 and its lobbyists
and backers began thinking they were pretty smart. That is, until it began killing
lots of Marines.
Lieutenant Colonel Keith Sweaney was known among his fellow Marines as “Mister
V-22.” He was the Marines’ most experienced V-22 pilot. He directed
the testing program for the aircraft and was scheduled to take command of the
first operation squadron of V-22s in 2001. That command never arrived.
In December of 2000, while Sweaney was flying a V-22 in North Carolina, something
went terribly wrong. Sweaney and three other Marines had taken the aircraft
out for what should have been a routine night-flying testing mission. The weather
was clear. Sweaney was flying at about 1,600 feet when he suddenly transmitted
a one-word distress signal—“Mayday.” Sweaney was unable to give
any details about what went wrong. About three minutes later, the aircraft crashed
into the earth. All four men aboard were killed.
Before Sweaney’s death, the Marines had been able to blame the previous
V-22 crashes on pilot error. In June 1991, one of the V-22’s development
aircraft crashed, an incident later blamed on “miswiring of the flight
control system.” It had crash-landed, on its side, during a test flight.
Fortunately, the pilots involved in the crash were not seriously hurt. In July
1992, a V-22 was trying to land at Quantico Marine Base in Virginia when one
of the engines caught fire. Death toll: three Marines, four civilian contractors.
In August of 1992, another V-22 crashed. The crew survived, despite landing
upside down on the tarmac of the Arlington Municipal Airport. The prototype
crash was blamed on a maintenance error.
In April 2000, a V-22 crashed in Mirana, Arizona, during a night training exercise.
The pilot of the machine lost control “during a high-sink-rate descent
and was unable to regain control before hitting the ground in a nose-down inverted
attitude.” The cause of the crash was a problem known as “vortex ring
state.” Death toll: 19 Marines. (More on vortex ring state in a moment.)
Eight months later, Sweaney’s aircraft crashed, an accident the Marines
blamed on a combination of a hydraulic leak and a glitch in the flight control
software.
None of those accidents would matter if taken separately. Every helicopter,
every airplane, crashes. Pilots die. Passengers die. That’s part of the
flying game. What is remarkable is that the V-22 has survived despite the death
of Sweaney and so many other Marines.
But Sweaney’s death forced Bell to stop flying the tilt-rotor aircraft.
Shortly afterward, the Defense Department appointed a special commission to
review the V-22’s overall safety and reliability. But this commission was
hardly independent and objective. The so-called “blue ribbon panel”
was stocked with former Marines as well as Norman Augustine, the former chairman
and CEO of weapons giant Lockheed Martin. When the panel released its report
in 2001, it said that the military should continue developing the aircraft at
low levels because it had shown that it could achieve many of the performance
targets outlined by the Pentagon. But the panel also found that the V-22 “fell
short of requirements for reliability, availability, and maintainability, suggesting
that the aircraft and its logistics support system have not yet matured to the
point of adequate supportability.” In other words, the V-22 might be a
great aircraft, but it might be too finicky to be able to work properly.
elicopters
are inherently unstable machines. They crash far more often and are far more
complicated than airplanes. The V-22 is designed to marry the helicopter with
the airplane by executing a very, very difficult maneuver: Leave the earth in
helicopter mode; while hovering the aircraft, rotate, in a very steady, predictable
manner, two 6000-horsepower turbine engines, along with their rapidly spinning
38-foot-wide rotors, from the vertical position to the horizontal position.
Do this while at the same time, keeping aloft an aircraft weighing about 50,000
pounds. Fly the machine for a while, then reverse the process: Return rotors
to horizontal, and carefully land the aircraft in helicopter mode. Needless
to say, these are not easy tricks.
Pulling the rabbit out of the hat means that the V-22 needs to use sophisticated
hydraulic pumps and lines capable of holding pressures of 5,000 pounds per square
inch. Those high-pressure lines are the ones responsible for getting the engine/rotor
assembly to swivel around. If one of those lines ruptures—and the lines
have proven to be failure-prone—the aircraft is likely to end up on the
ground in a hurry. And then there are the V-22’s exotic materials. The
V-22 is made almost entirely of composite materials (carbon-fiber and epoxy).
Even the rotors are made out of the high-tech material, which is stronger, yet
lighter, than steel. Only about 10 percent of the machine is made out of metal.
Not surprisingly, all the exotic materials make the V-22 difficult to produce
and maintain. And while all those things are important, the V-22 has another
major problem: physics.
All helicopters are subject to a phenomenon called power settling, or in scientific
jargon, vortex ring state. When rotorcraft hover in one place or are descending
rapidly, they can be hit with a sudden loss of lift. The problem occurs because
the rotors churn the air so thoroughly that the blades of the rotor lose their
ability to “grip” the air, and provide lift. Helicopter pilots have
been dealing with vortex ring state ever since the machines were invented. Pilots
found that their machines, even operating at full power, could suddenly fall
several dozen, or even several hundred feet, with little warning.
With helicopters, this problem can be overcome fairly easily. The pilot tilts
the machine forward and flies out of the disturbed air column. If the pilot
is too close to the ground to recover from vortex ring state, then the helicopter
hits the ground. It hits hard, but the helicopter tends to stay upright and
therefore, can land on its landing gear. That’s not the case with the V-22.
In the V-22, vortex ring state usually affects one rotor or the other, not both.
That’s bad. If one of the machine’s rotors suddenly cannot provide
lifting power and the other rotor continues to provide lift, then the V-22 likes
to roll over on its side or on its back, positions that are not conducive to
safe flying, particularly if the earth is nearby. The DOD’s 2001 report
on the V-22 said this “asymmetric vortex ring state” poses a “higher
risk of adverse outcome if it happens at low altitude (wing-first impact for
the tilt-rotor vs. hard landing for the helicopter).”
In this case, “adverse outcome” often means a smoldering ruin filled
with dead people. Bell and the Pentagon claim that they have solved the problem
with vortex ring state. But many critics of the aircraft say otherwise. The
V-22’s excessive weight (more than 20 tons) and unusual design exacerbate
the problems created by vortex ring state. “They can’t get away from
the problem of vortex ring state,” says Franklin “Chuck” Spinney,
a vocal gadfly who worked inside the Defense Department for 34 years before
retiring in mid-2003. Spinney’s expertise was in tactical aircraft development
and he gained a name for himself by throwing budgetary grenades at wasteful
defense spending projects. Spinney insists that the V-22 is doomed by the problem
of vortex ring state. “It’s physics,” says Spinney. “They
can’t fix it. End of story.”
Spinney isn’t the only critic. Ivan Eland, a defense analyst at the libertarian
Cato Institute, has called the V-22 a “prime example of a failed defense
acquisition system…. The Pentagon protects certain companies and manages
what it euphemistically calls competition as rampant politics [and] pork projects.”
Perhaps the most dogged analysis of the V-22 has been done by a retired Air
Force colonel named Harry Dunn. Now living in Virginia, Dunn heads a group of
aviators and engineers known as the “red ribbon panel.” Dunn, a former
helicopter pilot, has been investigating the aircraft for more than three years.
The V-22 is “a crippled albatross, which will continue killing” unless
it is stopped, says Dunn. A key problem is the V-22’s inability to perform
what pilots call “autorotation”—that’s the ability of helicopters
to glide to the earth in an emergency. If a helicopter’s engine fails or
gets damaged by enemy fire, it can often land safely because as the helicopter
descends, its rotor blades continue spinning. The spinning blades create lift,
which slows the aircraft’s descent. The V-22’s design effectively
prevents autorotation. That means that if the engines on a V-22 fail due to
mishap or enemy action while hovering at low altitude, all of the occupants
of the aircraft are much more likely to die.
From the outset, the Marines, Bell, and Boeing have taken the attitude of “let’s
build the thing and then fix it later,” says Dunn. While Dunn and other
Pentagon insiders fight the V-22 program, Bell and Boeing are working the halls
of Congress. In 2000 (the last year for which figures are readily available),
only 39 other companies spent more on lobbying in Washington than Textron. That
year, Textron spent nearly $4.7 million on its lobby effort. According to the
Center for Public Integrity, between 1997 and 2000, Textron spent $17.5 million
lobbying members of Congress. Boeing was spending huge amounts of money, too.
In 2000, Boeing spent $8.2 million on lobbying—more than any other defense
contractor. That year, the company ranked number 14 among all companies lobbying
that year and had 28 different lobby firms working in Washington. Those firms
were in addition to 17 of Boeing’s in-house lobbyists. Between 1997 and
2000, Boeing spent almost $34.5 million on lobbying.
The lobbying appears to be paying off. Despite the fatal crashes, despite ongoing
flight problems, despite the fact that the V-22 cannot carry a full load of
24 battle-ready soldiers, the airplane continues to get enormous amounts of
taxpayer money. In his 2004 defense budget, the biggest since the end of the
Cold War, President George W. Bush plans to spend another $1.1 billion to build
11 more V-22’s.
The money continues to flow despite astounding cost increases. In 1987, the
Pentagon assumed it would purchase 913 V-22s at a cost of about $33.2 billion.
The following year, the U.S. Army backed out of the V-22 program and the number
of V-22s to be built declined to just over 600. By December of 2001, according
to figures from the General Accounting Office, the number of aircraft had shrunk
to 458 but the total cost of the program had increased to $42.6 billion. That
means that the price per copy of the V-22 has gone from about $36 million in
the early days of the program to about $100 million. It’s a good thing
the V-22 doesn’t have toilet seats, or it might get really expensive.
Everest Riccioni, a retired Air Force colonel, is another V-22 critic. An aeronautical
engineer, he was one of the midwives of the F-16, widely acknowledged as perhaps
the best fighter aircraft ever built. In a study paid for by the Air Force,
Riccioni found that the V-22 would be far less capable than the Marines were
claiming and that the Corps was having trouble maintaining and keeping the V-22s
ready to fly. Perhaps his most important finding was that a conventional, modern
helicopter would be three times more cost-effective than the V-22. He also predicted
that despite its love of the V-22, the Marine Corps “must inevitably buy
a fleet of modern helicopters to make up for the Osprey’s many operational
defects and shortcomings.”
Texas’s senior U.S. Senator, Kay Bailey Hutchison, doesn’t see any
defects in the V-22. Hutchison may be the most powerful Texan in the U.S. Capitol
when it comes to defense spending. A member of the Senate Appropriations Committee
and that committee’s powerful Defense Subcommittee, she is not overly worried
about the V-22’s cost or safety issues. “I would never support anything
wherever it was made if it couldn’t be found safe,” Hutchison told
the Observer during a press conference in mid-May. “But in fact,
the opposite is true…. The Marine Corps feels very confident that it is
safe and I will not support it if it isn’t. But I am told that it is. And
they are comfortable that they have found what the problem was.” She did
not answer a question regarding the V-22’s cost.
Although Hutchison contends that the V-22’s problems have been fixed, it’s
not at all clear that she’s right. Indeed, the aircraft continues to flounder
in a testing program that began shortly after the fatal crash that killed Sweaney
in 2000. Last November, as a V-22 was trying to land aboard a U.S. Navy ship,
the aircraft became dangerously unstable, swinging rapidly from side to side.
The oscillations continued until the pilot released the controls and allowed
the V-22’s computer to take over the aircraft. In February of this year,
a Bell spokesman, Bob Leder, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that
the incident on the ship showed that “further refinements to the flight
control software and hardware are necessary.” In March, a brand new V-22
flying from the Bell plant in Amarillo to North Carolina was forced to make
an emergency landing at Dobbins Air Force Base in Georgia after the aircraft’s
emergency lubrication lights came on. The malfunction reportedly kept the aircraft
grounded at the base for several days.
While the Marines try to sort through the V-22’s latest problems, workers
continue building more of them. And that means that 2,000 jobs in Texas will
continue: 1,500 of them at Bell’s plant on the east side of Fort Worth
and another 500 jobs in Amarillo.
t might be
the prettiest factory floor in America. Freshly painted a sleek gray, the shop
floors at the Bell plant are immaculate. No scuff marks. No trash. No scratches.
The walkways on the edge of the floor, and at regular intervals throughout the
building, are painted a crisply contrasting navy blue. Everything is new, shiny,
and clean as a dentist’s canines. The plant operates at a low hum, the
quiet occasionally interrupted by a burst from a high-pitched drill. The workers
appear happy. They’re well paid. Their jobs are challenging and require
immense precision and attention to detail.
The economic development guys from Amarillo are in heaven. A group of out-of-town
journalists are visiting the factory in May of 2003 to see what’s happening
in Amarillo. The Bell plant is the city’s latest coup. This factory—on
Tiltrotor Drive—a short distance from the main passenger terminal at Amarillo
International Airport, is the city’s latest stab at diversification. Amarillo
needs all the diversification it can get. The employment base in the city of
214,000 has always been rather narrow. On the eastern edge of town, separated
by a dozen miles are so, lie two of the city’s biggest employers: the Tyson
Foods slaughterhouse and the Pantex nuclear weapons plant.
Given the rather grisly nature of those two factories, it’s not surprising
that the city was eager to find an industry with a bit more pizzazz. So in the
late 1990s, after Bell announced it wanted to find a new place to assemble the
aircraft, Amarillo got very interested. Bell wanted to get away from the unions
in its Fort Worth-area factories. It also wanted a place where there’d
be plenty of room to fly the V-22s it was producing.
Amarillo has plenty of airspace and a long military history. During World War
II, the Pentagon built Amarillo Army Airfield to train pilots. It later became
a U.S. Air Force base, which hosted a fleet of B-52s that were part of the Strategic
Air Command, the agency in charge of defending the skies during the Cold War.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, the B-52s and the Strategic Air Command flew
away, leaving behind acres of good hangar space and miles of sturdy runways
that were perfect for hosting airplanes. Plus, Bell had been in Amarillo before.
From 1968 through 1989, Bell operated a helicopter overhaul and modification
plant in some of those same B-52 hangars. Hueys that had been shot up in Vietnam
were taken to Amarillo for refurbishing.
Yes, an aircraft assembly plant was just what Amarillo needed to boost its image.
Not only would the new business be high-profile, there were unlikely to be a
bunch of striking slaughterhouse workers picketing in front of the plant, like
there were at Tyson. Nor would there be any radical environmentalist-types complaining
about the evils of plutonium and nuclear weapons. The Bell plant would be different,
an opportunity to put Amarillo in a different light. So the city of Amarillo
pulled out all the stops. It put on its best lipstick and tightest pair of blue
jeans and set out to lasso the new Bell plant. The city showed Bell that it
had plenty of space for flying (that’s an understatement). It had plenty
of non-union workers. It had rock-bottom cost-of-living. And it could offer
an even bigger plum: a brand-new, $40 million custom-built factory that wouldn’t
cost Bell a dime. Bell looked around. More than 1,000 municipalities from across
the U.S. expressed interest in hosting Bell’s new plant. Bell narrowed
the list down to eight finalists. Every one of the finalists was in Texas. Bell
saw that it could move to Amarillo for free—and did just that.
But the real reason Bell chose Amarillo, it appears, was politics. “The
V-22 stayed in Texas because it needed Congressional support,” a Bell executive
told the Dallas Morning News in late 2000. “We had support from
politicians.”
The new plant in Amarillo has meant 500 new jobs for the city, and in a place
like Amarillo, that’s a big deal. Each of the new jobs pays an average
of $20 per hour, a good wage on the high plains of Texas. All 500 of those jobs
will undoubtedly bolster Bell’s clout. As Spinney sees it, “the plant
in Amarillo only increases the momentum behind the V-22.”
But all of the political support for the V-22 still can’t hide the fact
that it is not cost-effective. Each aircraft now costs over $100 million and
that doesn’t include the cost of modifications that may have to be made
to it in the future as testing finds new flaws. Furthermore, two helicopters
now in production could easily fill the role the Marines envision for the V-22.
They are the S-92, made by Sikorsky, and the larger US-101, made by the European
consortium, AgustaWestland.
The twin-engine S-92 weighs about half what the V-22 does, and yet can carry
similar payloads. It has a top speed of 175 miles per hour and can travel over
500 miles without refueling. It has a bigger cabin than the V-22 and it has
proven to be far safer. In late 2002, the S-92 got its federal flight certification,
meaning federal authorities have found the helicopter to be safe enough to enter
regular commercial service. Sikorsky is selling the S-92 for about $20 million
per copy. Thus, for the cost of one V-22, the U.S. military could buy five S-92s.
The US-101 would also fill the Marines’ needs. The three-engine aircraft
is exactly the type of aircraft that Dick Cheney envisioned in the late 1980s
and early 1990s when he was trying to kill the V-22: a medium-life helicopter
built with familiar technology that was reliable and relatively inexpensive.
Now in use in Canada, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom, the US-101 is a
military-ready helicopter that has proven to be reliable, easily maintained,
and safe. The US-101 is lighter than the V-22, has a far bigger cabin and can
fly nearly 800 miles without refueling. And there’s another fact that Dick
Cheney would love: The US-101 was developed without spending a single dime of
American taxpayers’ money. In addition, the US-101 is cheaper—a lot
cheaper—than the V-22. For the cost of one V-22, the Pentagon could buy
four US-101s.
Despite all of their performance, safety, and cost advantages, the S-92 and
the US-101 are both fatally flawed—that’s right, they’re not
from Texas.
And finally, what does Dick Cheney think about the V-22 these days? Well, Kevin
Kellums, the vice president’s spokesman, said in a recent email that he
is “not aware of any time the VP has taken a position on the V-22 since
his tenure as Sec of Def ended.”
Hmmm. Imagine that.
Contributing writer Robert Bryce’s new book is Cronies: Oil, the Bushes,
and the Rise of Texas, America’s Superstate.
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