The Dream Machine by Richard Whittle

Author:Richard Whittle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

CHAPTER NINE

ANOTHER PERIOD OF DARKNESS

The sun was bright and the sky clear over Washington on Wednesday, September 8, 1999—perfect weather for watching a dream come true. Dick Spivey stood on a stone terrace outside the Pentagon’s River Entrance that morning, looking over a grassy parade ground below and the Potomac River beyond. In less than three months, Spivey would turn fifty-nine; what remained of his once-red hair was now gray. Today, though, he felt like a kid on Christmas morning. Several hundred people were on the terrace, mostly U.S. military officers and Pentagon bureaucrats, but Spivey saw a sprinkling of foreign military uniforms as well. Lots of Marines were there, along with senior executives from Boeing Helicopter Company, Bell Helicopter, and Bell’s corporate parent, Textron. Company public relations people were circulating among a gaggle of reporters and TV photographers. Spivey couldn’t wait to see the looks on their faces when the show they were waiting for began.

More than a quarter century after he had started selling it, nearly eighteen years after the Marine Corps had caught his fever for it, a decade after former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney had started trying to kill it, and seven years after the terrible crash at Quantico, Dick Spivey was sure the dream he’d devoted his life to was finally becoming reality. Today people would see, as Spivey had believed for nearly forty years, that the Holy Grail of aviation—a machine offering full freedom of flight—had been found, and that it was the tiltrotor. The Marines were just as certain that, after years of waiting and fighting, they were finally getting their dream machine, the V-22 Osprey. That was why General James L. Jones, Jr., the commandant of the Marine Corps, had decided to hold today’s event, Tiltrotor Technology Day at the Pentagon. It would begin with a little air show.

Spivey was going to enjoy the show, but he was there mainly to tell anyone who would listen about Bell’s newest tiltrotor vision. Tents and booths were set up on the parade ground for contractors to display tiltrotor-related wares and other Marine Corps equipment. Spivey would be at Bell’s display all day, talking up an idea called the Quad TiltRotor. He and three Bell engineers were applying for a patent on the concept: a tiltrotor more than twice the Osprey’s size—so big it would need two wings and four rotors. The QTR, as Bell called it, would be large enough to carry ninety troops or 40,000 pounds of cargo—four times the advertised payload of the Osprey. It would be designed to fly as far as 2,000 miles and set down on a scrap of ground most anywhere in the world. It would be a dream machine most any military commander would want. Spivey had briefed General Jones on the QTR a couple of months before and the commandant was sold on the idea. It had been an easy sell. Jones had visited Fort Worth in 1997 and flown in the XV-15, the little tiltrotor

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