Word: crashing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...trying to explain the Marines' passive treatment of Bell, says the company exerts a strong "gravitational pull" on the service. Bell reaps 95% of the Marines' spending on helicopters each year, or more than $1 billion. More critically, some Pentagon officials suggest that the Marines don't want the crash to jeopardize Bell's $36 billion V-22 program. That Marine "tilt-rotor" aircraft, which takes off and lands like a helicopter and cruises like a turboprop airplane, is on the verge of lifting off after more than a decade of troubled development...
...Marine Band. But the program has had powerful critics from the start. The Bush Administration tried to kill it, saying its $79 million-a-copy price tag was too steep. The Army has refused to buy the Osprey, citing its cost. Pentagon officials acknowledge that the Cobra's crash--and Bell's role in it--could complicate the Marines' efforts to keep buying V-22s because of doubts it might raise about Bell. "If the Marines come down hard on Bell, the whole program could be called into question," says Lawrence Korb, who oversaw Pentagon logistics and personnel during...
...families of the dead aviators agree. "There's a coziness and collusion between the Marines and Bell because of the Marines' reliance on Bell," says William Straw, father of the 29-year-old Marine pilot killed in the Texas crash. The Straw family knows something about military aviation. William, a 1967 graduate of the Air Force Academy and a former test pilot, won the Distinguished Flying Cross for piloting a C-130 cargo plane through bad weather and enemy fire to resupply a beleaguered U.S. outpost in Vietnam. Both of Robert's grandfathers won that decoration in World...
...Marines see their behavior differently. "The Marine Corps shares your grief and frustration," General T.R. Dake, the assistant commandant, wrote the Browne family last month. Yet the service has taken no action against Bell, the Marines argue, because the corps can't pinpoint the cause of the crash and therefore the responsibility for it cannot be established...
...Marines are strangely revising their own findings. Last week an officer speaking on behalf of the corps told TIME that it believes pilot error caused the crash because the crew failed to glide the chopper safely to the ground with its unpowered but spinning rotor blades. That is a startling assertion, given that the official investigation contained no hint that the crew members' actions contributed to their death. It seems the Marine credo--"The risk of death has always been preferable to letting a fellow Marine down"--may have been set aside in this case...