Richard Whittle’s The Dream Machine is about the quest for the ultimate flying machine — a quest that took 25 years and $22 billion to bring us the V-22 Osprey:
The Osprey was originally supposed to fly ten types of missions for four armed services, carry its own missiles and guns, fly 2,400 miles without refueling, have a cabin pressurized against nuclear, biological and chemical agents — the list went on and on. It also had to use what at the time were cutting edge technologies, like composite materials instead of metal in the fuselage and “fly-by-wire” electronic flight controls. The Pentagon asked Bell Helicopter and Boeing for a real dream machine, and they said they could build one. But one of the stories I tell in the book is how, when he saw what the military wanted, Bell’s chief tiltrotor engineer threatened to resign rather than design it. He was afraid it was going to discredit the tiltrotor concept.
The Osprey may still redeem itself, Whittle says. He explains why the Marines love such outlandish technology:
The Marines are risk-takers by nature, but as I explain in the book, they’ve been in love with vertical-lift aircraft since the helicopter and the atomic bomb emerged during World War II. They saw very quickly that in the atomic age, it might be impossible to do amphibious assaults — their trademark mission — from ships anchored close to a hostile shore, the way they did them in World War II. They fell in love with the tiltrotor because it offered a faster and better way to take Marines to a fight from ships at sea. Their passion for it, though, stems from their unique culture. Unlike the other armed services, the Marines are also a tribe or even a cult, and one of their tribal beliefs is that they have to be different to continue as a separate branch of the military. It’s hard to remember these days, but at various times in their history, the other services and even presidents have tried to abolish the Marines or fold them into the Army or shrink the Corps beyond recognition. Harry Truman once famously said — and later regretted it — that “the Marine Corps is the Navy’s police force.” So for the Marines, the Osprey has been an existential question. That’s why they were willing to pay such a high price in time and money and lives to get it.
Whittle has ridden in an Osprey in Iraq:
Once it gets airborne like a helicopter, the pilot or copilot tells the crew, “Ready to go fast,” and turns a little thumbwheel on the control stick to tilt the rotors forward to fly like an airplane. It can convert to airplane mode in about 12 seconds, but even before the rotors get all the way forward, the Osprey takes off like a floored Corvette. Riding in it in Iraq wasn’t much different from flying in it elsewhere, except that a crew chief fired some rounds from the machine gun on the back ramp to test it after we took off. In theory, there was a chance somebody would shoot at us, but peace had broken out in Al Anbar province at the time – this was December 2007. Besides, while helicopters usually fly low in combat zones, the Marines cruise their Ospreys at 8,000 feet or more, well above the range of AK-47s and RPGs. The Osprey gets to that altitude quickly enough that getting shot at wasn’t a great worry when I flew in Iraq. It also gets you where you’re going a lot faster than a helicopter can, and it doesn’t shake and rattle you the way many military helicopters do.