The Dream Machine: The Untold History of the Notorious V-22 Osprey
Written by Richard Whittle
Narrated by Kevin Foley
5/5
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About this audiobook
By 2000, the Osprey was nine years late and billions of dollars 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 listener 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.
Richard Whittle
Richard Whittle has written about the military and aviation for more than three decades, including twenty-two years on the Pentagon beat for the Dallas Morning News. His writing has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Congressional Quarterly, and other publications, and he has worked as an editor at National Public Radio. He is the author of The Dream Machine: The Untold History of the Notorious V-22 Osprey and Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution. He and his wife live near Washington, DC.
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Reviews for The Dream Machine
4 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Fantastic, although lengthy, review of the MV-22 development. Includes fascinating insights from all angles: the NAVAIR PMO, the Bell and Boeing companies, the Congress, the news media, etc.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Whittle started reporting on the V-22 in 1984. He finished this book in 2009 and the story is still playing out. He compared covering the Osprey to those that cover abortion issues. There is little neutrality involved. No matter what kind of article he wrote he was inundated with complaints from opposing sides. Many thought the tiltrotor (takes off like a helicopter, levels out and flies like an airplane) was the worst concept in aviation history. Others thought it the most practical idea in short-flight aviation history. Rarely did the two sides meet. Many weren't opposed to the V-22 itself but were opposed to the costs involved developing the aircraft. It got development costs approved in 1981 after the Desert One fiasco in Iran in 1979 that showed the liabilities of helicopters in missions with great distances involved. Helicopters are slow and not exactly smooth rides. The first proposal was approved with the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines initially deciding to take some. The Marines wanted it the most. The Army eventually bowed out of the program. The author takes us through the procurement battles and procedures of starting a new aircraft project. It is a labyrinth with obscure processes even in non-controversial aircraft. The V-22 ended up being the poster child for delayed and over budget military development plans. Dick Cheney fought the hardest to kill it. It didn't get full production status until 2005. It wasn't field operational until 2007. It still is only being supplied ten to twelve new aircraft per year. To fulfill the original contract numbers for the full slate of aircraft will still takes years to finish. It's looking like a fifty year timeline. There were civilian plans for the aircraft also. Those are advancing at an even slower pace.Whittle set out to write his book from neither a pro or con viewpoint of the Osprey. He covers the good, the bad, and the tragic. Thirty lives were lost in crashes. He had two and a half decades of reporting on the V-22 to mine for the book. It shows. It is thorough and detailed in the narrative manner in which he relays the ups and downs of the V-22 Osprey history.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is really excellant journalism, as the author examines how Bell Helicopter became infected with tilt-rotor fever, transmitted the disease to Secretary of the Navy John Lehman, and thus set off a sorry tale of a lousy partnership with Boeing, dubious funding maneuvers that kept the program on life support but not healthy, and a slap-dash sprint to get the Osprey ready for service issue that would lead to calamity; a real text-book example of how not to manage a cutting-edge technology project.Was it worth it? Whittle seems cautiously positive but makes no definitive statement on the matter, as even if the Osprey now represents a real capability it came at a high price, and Whittle does work very hard at trying to do justice to all the parties involved. In retrospect it might have been wise for the Marine Corps to have ordered conventional helicopters under the Reagan Administration and then take the time to produce a mature tilt-rotor prototype.While not Whittle's mission, this work suggests that there's systematic study waiting to be written about the failures of procuring new weapons systems for the U.S. military in the 1980s, as so many programs then initiated (Comanche attack chopper, A-12 attack bomber, Paladin self-propelled gun, Virginia class nuclear submarine, SDI, etc.) now appear to be half-baked failures. Even allowing for the Cold War enthusiasm for "Blue Sky" efforts to leap a generation in terms of capability and steal a march on the Soviets, incrementalism might have been the smarter strategy. Certainly the Bell-Boeing misadventures with the use of composite materials in the Osprey (a major thread of Whittle's story) makes one give a sigh of relief that the A-12 Avenger was cancelled.As for my rating, the only reason I don't give this work the full five stars is that the story of the Osprey isn't over yet.