Word: tilts
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...hard to imagine an American weapons program so fraught with problems that Dick Cheney would try repeatedly to cancel it - hard, that is, until you get to know the Osprey. As Defense Secretary under George H.W. Bush, Cheney tried four times to kill the Marine Corps's ungainly tilt-rotor aircraft. Four times he failed. Cheney found the arguments for the combat troop carrier unpersuasive and its problems irredeemable. "Given the risk we face from a military standpoint, given the areas where we think the priorities ought to be, the V-22 is not at the top of the list...
Originally, the program was designed to churn out the first of more than 1,000 tilt-rotors in less than 10 years for $40 million each. But this was no conventional plane. The Osprey may cruise like an airplane, but it takes off and lands vertically like a helicopter. The technical challenge of rotating an airplane's wings and engines in midair led to delays, which in turn led to an ever higher price tag. As expenses rose, the Pentagon cut the number of planes it wanted to buy, which in turn increased the unit price. Citing rising costs...
...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 to stick with the program. And so, despite Cheney's doubts, the Osprey survived...
...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, the Pentagon determined that the ability to perform the safety procedure was no longer a necessary...
...Other analysts think the pro-McCann tilt is a mistake. "The press have treated the parents almost too nicely," says Adrian Monck, head of London's City University's Department of Journalism, and that could backfire if any portion of the Portuguese police's suspicions that the McCanns might know more than they are saying proves correct. Adds Charlie Beckett, a media and communications expert at the London School of Economics: "The media have almost been campaigning on behalf of the McCanns instead of adopting a more balanced position. Now they're finding it much harder to change tack...