Osprey’s Hopes and Heartbreak

It was going to be a big day for Marine pilot Keith M. Sweaney: A gleaming new MV-22 Osprey aircraft was making a premier flight to Quantico Marine Air Station, and when it touched down, the young flier was finally going to get his first chance at the controls.

But his excitement turned to alarm when the approaching Osprey burst into flames and plummeted into the Potomac River. Sweaney spent that afternoon in July 1992 helping to recover bodies.

Sweaney was there to help with the same terrible job last April, when 19 people died in an Osprey crash in Arizona.

Lt. Col. Sweaney, 42, had risen to become one of the top officers in the Osprey program and one of the aircraft’s strongest advocates. Yet, “he had to pull friends’ bodies out of the Osprey, two times, and that really tore him up,” recalled his older brother, Brian.

About two months ago, another Osprey went down--this time with Sweaney at the controls. He and three others died.

In that hope and heartbreak, Sweaney’s history with the Osprey mirrors the tempestuous relationship the Marine Corps has had with the innovative aircraft for two decades.

Fatal accidents and military craft sometimes seem to go together. In the last two weeks, a U.S. submarine sliced through a Japanese fishing boat, leaving nine people lost at sea, and two Army Blackhawk helicopters collided in midair, killing six soldiers. But Sweaney’s death, and the deaths of dozens of others in Osprey crashes, may point to a special problem.

The Corps made the Osprey its most urgent acquisition priority because of capabilities its leaders believe will revolutionize amphibious operations.

With huge rotors that swivel from vertical to horizontal position and back, the Osprey can fly with the speed and range of an airplane yet take off and land like a helicopter.

The Corps’ long campaign to replace its fleet of Vietnam-era helicopters with 360 Ospreys has been disrupted by four crashes, including two in the last nine months, that have killed 30 Marines. Just as the program was about to get the go-ahead for full-scale production, the death of Sweaney and his three comrades forced the Pentagon to ground the entire fleet of Ospreys while it tries to determine whether the hybrid craft is jinxed by mechanical imperfections or perhaps a more fundamental conceptual flaw.

Even more jolting, the Marines disclosed last month that at least one high-ranking officer may have cut ethical corners to deflect criticism of the Osprey.

The commander of the Osprey squadron at New River, N.C., Lt. Col. Odin Fred Leberman, was relieved of command Jan. 18 and may face criminal charges for allegedly urging his squadron to falsify maintenance records to make the plane appear more airworthy than it is.

The disclosures, combined with the history of fatal crashes, have led to speculation that the Bush administration might scale back--or even cancel--the $40-billion program.

The Osprey’s mounting troubles weighed heavily on Sweaney, who was to assume command of the first Osprey tactical squadron in April, and who was, to many Marines, a symbol of the program.

Sweaney, who grew up in the Richmond, Va., area, joined the Marines after attending Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Va. To the recruiters who signed him up, he must have looked like the perfect candidate: a compact, athletic kid with a strong jaw, a top student who had excelled as a nose guard on the Randolph-Macon Yellow Jackets football team.

“I think he was born to be in the Marines,” said Chuck Seay, a Richmond appliance dealer who had known Sweaney since fourth grade.

Seay recalled how Sweaney once popped a playground bully in the nose. Instead of nursing a grudge or seeking revenge, the bully began following Sweaney around, transformed into an ally by the younger boy’s winning personality.

“You could tell he was going to go on to big things,” Seay said. “I said it even then: ‘Sweaney’s going to be a general.’ ”

After finishing basic flight training in 1982, Sweaney learned to handle the CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopter, a Marine Corps workhorse for decades.

In 1989, he landed one of the greatest honors available to Marine pilots when he was assigned to Marine Helicopter Squadron 1. The unit, based at Quantico, ferries the president of the United States in the immaculate green-and-white craft called Marine One.

The glory of working with HMX-1, as it is called, thrilled Sweaney’s parents, Robert and Ruth, as well as his wife, Carol, and two brothers. Sweaney sent home mementos: White House greeting cards, Christmas tree ornaments, HMX-1 shot glasses.

Like many other CH-53 pilots, Sweaney was initially wary of the Osprey and its tilt-rotor concept.

“He kind of saw it as a threat to what he loved to do,” said brother Brian, one year older.

Yet the ungainly looking Osprey had qualities helicopter pilots found appealing.

Its top cruising speed of more than 300 mph was about twice the speed of the CH-46 Sea Knight that it is replacing. The big Allison engines that drive the Osprey’s 38-foot turboprops provide huge power to maneuver the craft.

In the class structure of military aviation, helicopter pilots have sometimes been looked down on. The Osprey’s speed gave it extra cachet.

All these things eventually attracted Sweaney too, and he put in long hours training on flight simulators to learn the skills needed to fly the Osprey. He lobbied to become part of the program--even flying across the country to make a personal appeal to a superior officer.

But before he could make his first flight, Sweaney experienced the shock of seeing the Osprey prototype go down at Quantico, about 30 miles south of Washington, in 1992.

He and about 30 others were watching at the landing zone as the Osprey circled the field three times. Suddenly, they heard several explosions. An engine burst into flame. Half a mile from the runway, the aircraft tanked into the muddy waters of the Potomac.

The accident, blamed on a leak of hydraulic fluid, came one year after another prototype Osprey had crashed at Wilmington, Del., without injuries.

Despite the setbacks, the Osprey program proceeded and Sweaney flourished. In 1993, he was chosen for the Osprey team.

He knew how to please his superiors, yet subordinates felt he was loyal to their interests too. “He was Mr. MV-22, as far as I was concerned,” said Col. Arthur M. Reynolds Jr., commanding officer of the HMX-1 squadron.

Sweaney was chosen to lead a 500-Marine “operational evaluation” team to figure out how the Osprey could best be used in combat and rescue situations. Three months before the end of the team’s work, on April 8, 2000, the tragic crash occurred in Arizona.

It was one of the most costly military aircraft calamities in years. The 19 dead included four Marine crew members who worked directly for Sweaney.

“He went through hell over that,” said brother Brian.

Sweaney flew to a series of memorial services around the country for the Marines.

Lt. Gen. Fred McCorkle, deputy Marine commandant for aviation, remembers attending a commemorative service at the tiny Marana, Ariz., airport six months after the accident. In the midst of the mourners, he noticed one particularly sorrowful face. It was Sweaney.

An investigative board blamed the accident on the mistake of Marine pilots who, in their eagerness to complete the nighttime mission, had allowed the Osprey to descend so quickly that it spun out of control.

By last fall, the Osprey’s “operational evaluation” was complete, and the way should have been clear for full-scale production.

But the two fatal crashes had created public relations problems, and some government analysts were warning of frailties in the aircraft that needed more study and correction.

The General Accounting Office, for one, found that the Marine Corps omitted tests of the aircraft that would have provided additional data on rapid descents that contributed to the April crash, the Washington Post reported Sunday.

And in November, the Pentagon’s top testing official, Philip E. Coyle III, issued a report saying the Osprey could be tough to control. He said it was difficult to maintain its complex components, including the sophisticated, high-pressure hydraulic system.

And Coyle said the April crash suggested the Osprey might be more vulnerable than other planes to “vortex ring state”--a condition in which the aircraft rotors, flying into air they have already disturbed, lose their capacity to lift. Other critics began to ask if the Osprey could stand up to the rigors of combat.

Sweaney took the criticism hard.

Sweaney believed developing aircraft was always dangerous. He once told Marine Lt. Gen. W. A. Whitlow, a longtime friend and his former commanding officer: “I know it’s a new concept and everybody’s going to criticize it. But if the U.S. military gave up the first time anything went wrong, we’d still have the horse cavalry.”

Sweaney had revealed his feelings in 1986, when, flying a mission with Whitlow, he heard that the space shuttle Challenger had gone down, killing seven. If he died that way, he told Whitlow, “it will be the way I wanted to go.”

Marine officials point out that of the first 11 F-14 fighters that were built, eight crashed. Of the first three CH-53 helicopters, two went down.

Statistics compiled by the Navy’s flight safety center show that, by one often-used measure, the Osprey has been more accident-prone than its two predecessors, the CH-46 Sea Knight and CH-53 Sea Stallion, during their early years. But it has a better record than the F-18 fighter at its premiere.

The measure, called the “Class A mishap rate,” is based on how many accidents involving casualties or more than $1 million in damage occur per 100,000 hours of flying.

The Osprey, with about 4,000 flight-hours to date, currently has a Class A mishap rate of about 50. The rate never exceeded 26 for the CH-46 and was never above 30 for the CH-53.

The F-18 had three crashes and a mishap rate of 78 after its first 4,000 flight-hours of testing, about where the Osprey program is now.

Marine officials say helicopter pilots continue to strongly support the Osprey and insist there has been no slackening of their desire to fly the plane.

Privately, however, some Marine helicopter pilots said that the Osprey accidents have caused anxiety.

“I think people would like to fly it, but they want to know that it’s been all tested out first,” said one Marine flier who asked to remain unidentified. Among the fliers who make up the pool of potential Osprey trainees, “I don’t think you’d see a lot of people raising their hands at the moment.”

Sweaney’s family, for their part, didn’t worry, since they saw him “as like a superman--untouchable,” said brother Brian. “There was no way an aircraft was going to go down when he was flying it. That’s how we thought of it.”

Brian recalled the last get-together of the three Sweaney brothers. Keith and Brian joined Robbie Sweaney, 34, on a nighttime fishing trip on the Chickahominy River in Tidewater Virginia.

The men stayed up late, their poles propped over the stern of Brian’s boat, waiting for signs of blue catfish, which can weigh as much as 80 pounds in that sluggish stretch of river. Keith, always the most competitive, stayed up until 3 a.m. watching his line, trying to make sure he caught a bigger fish than Brian or Robbie.

During the brothers’ long, rambling conversation that night, Sweaney avoided talking about the Osprey. It seemed that “he wanted some relief,” Brian said. “Obviously, losing his friends bothered him . . . and he wanted the program to work, so badly.”

Sweaney was excited about the months ahead. This April, he was to take over the Osprey squadron. In that prestigious role, he would lead the Osprey’s first mission at sea as part of a Marine expeditionary team.

Col. Reynolds, commander of the HMX-1 squadron at Quantico, said Sweaney was a “shoo-in” for promotion to full colonel and had a good shot at bigger things in the future.

In December, Sweaney was preparing to move from Quantico to his new job at New River, where eight Osprey are based. Since he had not flown for a month, he arranged a nighttime “warmup” exercise on Dec. 11 to refresh his skills.

It was going to be no more than a routine session. He took along a top crew: Maj. Michael L. Murphy, 38, the most experienced Osprey pilot; Sgt. Jason A. Buyck, 24; and Staff Sgt. Avely W. Runnels, 25.

As they headed out, Sweaney told the other fliers it would be a short flight. “We’ll be back in time for ‘Monday Night Football,’ ” he said.

About 90 minutes into the flight, the Osprey suffered a major hydraulic failure, which was compounded by a series of software glitches that made the aircraft uncontrollable.

Three seconds before the plane hit the ground, the crew radioed the base one last word: “Mayday.”