Word: pentagonal
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That left the relatively tiny Marine Corps footing most of the bill for the project - the V-22 accounts for nearly 70% of its procurement budget - and overseeing a program larger and more technically challenging than any the service was accustomed to managing. Sensing weakness at the Pentagon, congressional supporters, largely from the V-22's key manufacturing states of Texas (Bell Helicopter) and Pennsylvania (Boeing), created the Tilt-Rotor Technology Coalition to keep the craft alive, despite Cheney's opposition. They were aided by nearly 2,000 V-22 suppliers, in more than 40 states, who pressured their lawmakers...
...birthday and Bill Clinton became President, the Marines had spent $13 billion on the planes. None were ready for war. In 1991 one of the first V-22s crashed when taking off for its maiden flight - because of improper wiring. A second crash killed seven in 1992. The Clinton Pentagon stuck with the program through the 1990s, but in 2000 two more V-22s crashed, killing 23 Marines. With that, the Marines grounded the Osprey for 18 months...
...been controversy over a sandstorm test for the craft. The V-22's tendency to generate a dust storm when it lands in desert-like terrain wasn't examined because "an unusually wet spring resulted in a large amount of vegetation that prevented severe brownouts during landing attempts," the Pentagon's top tester noted. But the program continued, albeit with a caution about the aircraft's ability to fly in dusty conditions...
...less aggressively, which critics say is the only reason no V-22 has crashed since. "They keep talking about all the things it can do, but little by little its operations are being more and more restricted," says Philip Coyle, who monitored the V-22's development as the Pentagon's top weapons tester from 1994 to 2001. The V-22 can fly safely "if used like a truck, carrying people from one safe area to another safe area," he says. "But I don't see them using it in combat situations where they will have...
...toward the ground, just as maple seeds do in the fall. Autorotation, which turns a normally soft touchdown into an very hard emergency landing, is at least survivable. It became clear, however, that the design of the Osprey, adjusted many times over, simply could not accommodate the maneuver. The Pentagon slowly conceded the point. "The lack of proven autorotative capability is cause for concern in tilt-rotor aircraft," a 1999 report warned. Two years later, a second study cautioned that the V-22's "probability of a successful autorotational landing ... is very low." Unable to rewrite the laws of physics...