Storming Capitol Hill: The Few, the Proud, the Politically Wired

He was the best they had.

Earlier in his career, the Marines had entrusted Lt. Col. Keith M. Sweaney with the president’s life: He flew the Marine One helicopter.

Now, at 42, he was leading the team charged with evaluating the V-22 Osprey, an experimental aircraft intended to replace Vietnam-era helicopters. Next, he was to command the first tactical Osprey squadron.

All that meant little one night in December 2000 as Sweaney and a crew of three practiced landings and approaches at a Marine base in eastern North Carolina. After two hours of flight, the Osprey suddenly dropped from the sky as the crew radioed for help: “Declare emergency! We’re going down! We’re going down!”

It had happened again.

Since 1957, the Marines have nurtured the futuristic dream of creating a flying force unrestricted by the availability of runways and control towers. The hybrid aircraft would be like no other, combining a helicopter’s ability to lift off from small clearings and an airplane’s speed in blasting toward the battlefield.

By delivering troops to the front in the Osprey and then protecting them with combat planes that can be positioned nearby, the Marines hope to make themselves an indispensable fighting force.

But their first vertical-lift aircraft, the Harrier jump jet, has never played a distinctive role in battle for the Marines during its three-decade life span. And the Osprey, despite 13 years of testing and the expenditure of $12.6 billion, is not close to seeing action.

Their most notable records to date have been their exceptionally high accident rates. Seventy-one Marines and four civilians have died in noncombat crashes aboard the two aircraft.

Harrier training accidents have taken the lives of 45 Marines, mostly one at a time. A single Osprey crash in Arizona killed 19 Marines just eight months before Sweaney and his crew perished.

The Osprey crashes shocked the public. But to those familiar with the corps’ aviation program, they represented merely the latest sacrifice in the Marine Corps’ single-minded half-century quest to build an all-vertical air fleet.

It is a dream they may be on the verge of achieving.

The Osprey is moving persistently forward despite skepticism at high levels; the Harrier is expected to fly for another 13 to 17 years, and the Marines have been promised a Harrier successor that will extend their vision into the mid-21st century.

If all goes as planned, the Marines will receive their own special version of the next-generation Joint Strike Fighter, which is now in development. The Air Force and Navy also will get the supersonic jet, but only the Marines have ordered a model that can lift off after a short roll and land vertically.

The Marines have pulled off this feat by showing the same tenacity in the political trenches that they bring to the battlefield.

Though they are the smallest of the four military services, or perhaps because they are, the Marines are unparalleled at working their way in Washington, having outlasted adversaries in Democratic and Republican administrations alike.

Political Can-Do

Their strategy comes straight from the Pentagon’s procurement playbook: Sell a weapon as a lifesaving necessity, build broad coalitions of self-interested constituencies, and then, once victorious, immediately begin pushing for its successor.

But the Marines add the aura of “the few, the proud” to the formula:

* They exploit the Pentagon’s dissemination of design and construction contracts around the country to broaden their political base. They seek the support of lawmakers in districts where aircraft parts are made and where the Marines are major employers.

* They build alliances with defense contractors, who make substantial campaign contributions to influential lawmakers and retain retired Marine generals for their access and expertise.

* They plead for new aircraft by highlighting the hazards of their aging fleet, particularly helicopters that have had their own serious safety problems. But they refuse Pentagon offers of existing aircraft or other substitutes that might undercut their prospects for building an all-vertical force.

* They appeal to former Marines and Marine reservists sitting in Congress. The dictum “once a Marine, always a Marine” means something on Capitol Hill.

* They play their spit-and-polish image for every vote. Addressing lawmakers, the commandant may call the Marines “your corps.” A lawmaker who raises a concern with one of the Marines’ legislative aides may find the commandant at the door that very day.

“It’s the mystique, much of which is well earned,” said Lawrence J. Korb, a former Pentagon official now at the Council on Foreign Relations. “The Marines are not just another military service. They’re seen as something special.”

A showdown over the Osprey in the late 1980s illustrates their mastery. Blocked at the Pentagon, they joined forces with allies in Congress. Opposed there by the key committee chairman, they outflanked him on his own turf.

In a time of tightening defense budgets, the aircraft was opposed as too costly by both Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, a Republican, and Les Aspin, Democratic chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. Normally, that kind of alliance would be insurmountable. But just before the key vote, the Marines’ legislative affairs officer told Aspin that he was about to lose in his own committee. Aspin didn’t budge. As forewarned, he was defeated in a tie vote that effectively saved the Osprey.

Today, the Osprey’s future is again uncertain. The military’s chief procurement officer has questioned whether the plane will ever be safe enough for use in combat. Yet the Marines remain resilient. Not only are they counting on getting the Osprey, they say they plan to pursue as many as three more hybrid aircraft to take the place of their attack helicopters, transport planes and unmanned drones.

A vertical fleet would provide the United States with an important edge in war, they say, arguing that their opponents underestimate the military challenges ahead. The high accident rates, they say, have been the price of technological progress, but now the dark days are behind them.

“We have learned lessons well,” said Lt. Gen. Michael A. Hough, the chief of Marine aviation and a former director of the Joint Strike Fighter program.

But experience with the Harrier and Osprey raises natural questions about the aircraft of the future. Can they ever be as safe as conventional planes? Do the benefits justify the costs?

“The Marines have a fabulous can-do attitude,” said Philip E. Coyle, the Pentagon’s chief of weapons testing and evaluation from 1994 to 2001. “But sometimes the technology you’re dealing with is so complex that no amount of can-do attitude can overcome the technical difficulties.”

The Harrier

Procurement, it might seem, would be an executive branch game. The Pentagon decides which weapons it wants and, along with the White House, how to prioritize them.

But Congress wields the power of the purse, and as the Harrier’s history illustrates, the Marines have become particularly adept at maneuvering past the Pentagon’s civilian leaders to keep the money flowing.

“I can’t tell you how many times the program was, quote-unquote, ‘canceled,’ ” said Vince L. Higbee, Harrier program manager for Boeing Co., which makes the airframe. “It really was reliant on members of Congress to keep it alive.”

From the beginning, the Marines were sensitive to how Congress -- and U.S. defense contractors -- would react to the purchase of warplanes made in Britain.

Marine Col. Thomas H. Miller and another pilot first tested the Harrier in secret in 1968. Shortly thereafter, Miller was dispatched to St. Louis to see James Smith McDonnell, chairman of McDonnell Douglas, the maker of Marine F-4 Phantoms. The Marines wanted to buy fewer F-4s to free money for the first Harriers.

Miller said he told McDonnell that the Marines would strive to bring production of the Harrier home to the U.S., suggesting that McDonnell Douglas would be rewarded tomorrow for a show of selflessness today. McDonnell went along and several years later the company became the domestic manufacturer of a new Harrier model.

Shortly after receiving the Harrier, the Marines declared that it had launched them toward an all-vertical air program. But the plane began crashing so often that it earned the nickname “the Widow-Maker.”

Confronting concern in Congress, the Marines devised a tactic. The Harrier’s safety record, they argued, should not be judged by the accepted military standard: accidents per 100,000 flight hours.

Instead, they said the jet should be measured by its accidents per mission. Because the plane typically flew large numbers of relatively brief sorties, this had the effect of making the Harrier appear safer.

Miller said this seemed to work with Sen. William Proxmire (D-Wis.), a watchdog on government waste who was so concerned about the Harrier’s accident rate that he raised the possibility of canceling it.

“We explained this business of accident rate versus sortie versus hours flown,” Miller said. “We never heard any more from him.”

Retired Lt. Gen. Charles H. Pitman, who headed Marine aviation from 1988 to 1990, remembered thinking the tactic was clever but disingenuous. “The fact that you’re getting a lot of sorties in before you lose one doesn’t make me feel any better,” he said. “But, you know, we were defending the concept.”

While fighting for the new model of the Harrier, the Marines rejected a Pentagon proposal to purchase additional A-4 Skyhawk attack jets for the corps. Doing so would have kept the A-4 production line open in case the Harrier faltered.

End Run

The AV-8A Harrier was not airborne for long when the Marines began lobbying for its replacement, now using its high crash rate to their advantage.

They argued that an upgraded model would dramatically improve the plane’s safety as well as its combat performance. The Ford administration gave them the nod in 1976 to develop the AV-8B.

But when Jimmy Carter took office, his Defense Secretary, Harold Brown, sought to block the purchase of the AV-8B, citing safety concerns and skepticism about its benefits in battle.

The Marines didn’t help themselves when they tried to impress Carter administration officials with a Harrier bombing demonstration off the Navy carrier Saratoga in July 1977. Before their eyes, an AV-8A piloted by Capt. Timothy C. Krepps, 30, slammed into the Atlantic.

“It was a horrific sort of thing,” recalled Budget Director Bert Lance. “It was out on the horizon. You could see him disappear.” (An investigation determined that Krepps, who died in the crash, had become disoriented.)

The Marines persisted, working hard on Capitol Hill to impress lawmakers with the invaluable role the Harrier might play in a variety of theoretical combat scenarios.

“We found the Marines would make up missions faster than we could shoot them down,” said Robert A. Speir, a former tactical air analyst at the Pentagon who wrote classified reports recommending termination of the Harrier program.

The Marines also pointed out that “parts of the Harrier are built in a lot of states,” Pitman said. “We made sure of that.”

They got help from the British government, which encouraged the U.S. to invest in the Harrier, with its Rolls-Royce engine and other English-made components.

And the corps appealed to the 35 former Marines and reservists in Congress at that time, including members of the key Appropriations and Armed Services committees. Among the lawmakers was Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio), the former astronaut and Marine aviator.

Glenn, now retired, is so close to his ex-Marine training squadron colleague, Thomas Miller, who rose to the rank of lieutenant general, that the two families jointly own a 63-foot boat on the Potomac named “SENIRAM II,” which spelled backward means “two Marines.”

Glenn, who took a flight in an early Harrier trainer, said he fought for the plane because he believed in its mission. “It really makes a better combat capability for the Marine Corps because of its ability to go in and operate behind the lines,” he said.

Though Brown refused to fund the purchase of the AV-8B, he allowed development to proceed. That kept the program alive until Carter was replaced in 1981 by Ronald Reagan, who advocated a rapid defense buildup. The Marines then won approval to buy 283 AV-8Bs for $8.2 billion.

As the acquisition program wound down, they again ran into opposition, this time from one of their own, Pitman. While Pitman was a true believer in the Marine’s vertical vision, he had grown concerned about the Harrier’s safety. As head of Marine aviation in the late 1980s, he fought the purchase of some of the last of the AV-8Bs.

“We were still having a lot of the troubles that we had before,” Pitman recalled, “and we were losing an inordinate amount of aircraft through mechanical problems and we were also losing some pilots. We actually stopped the program for a short period.”

After Pitman’s retirement, the Marines won approval in 1992 to replace five AV-8Bs lost in combat and one in training during the Persian Gulf War.

As they have fought for the Harrier over the years, the Marines have tried to buff the plane’s reputation, sometimes embellishing its accomplishments in battle.

After the Gulf War, then-Commandant Alfred M. Gray Jr. told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “we would not have won the victory that we did in our sector without that magnificent close-air support” for ground troops provided by Harriers.

But most Harrier bombing missions took place when there were no U.S. ground troops in combat to support, according to a prominent study of the air war. During the four-day ground war, the Marines themselves determined that only 14% of all AV-8B sorties qualified as close air support.

Five years later, when pushing for the Marine version of the Joint Strike Fighter, Brig. Gen. Robert Magnus told Congress the AV-8Bs had operated during Desert Storm from “an expeditionary airfield located in a soccer stadium at Jubail, Saudi Arabia” -- implying that the plane had used its vertical ability to fly in and out. This claim has been repeated by numerous Marine generals.

In truth, the planes based in Jubail flew off a runway a half a mile from the soccer stadium, according to several Marine commanders who were there.

Even so, the corps’ salesmanship has succeeded, establishing Marine aviation as a unique fighting force that required unique aircraft. On the Hill and in the Pentagon, that principle has become gospel.

The Osprey

Parts of the Osprey are manufactured in more than 40 states and in hundreds of congressional districts. The fuel tanks are made in northwest Georgia. The engine casings come from Missouri, the engine starters from North Carolina.

Therein lies the foundation of a political alliance, formally known as the Tilt-Rotor Technology Coalition. It has fought tenaciously, both in the late 1980s and again in the last two years, to defend the revolutionary aircraft.

The ungainly Osprey lifts off like a helicopter using a pair of rotors that then tilt forward so the aircraft can cruise at high speeds and altitudes like a propeller-driven plane. With the fuselage of a traditional transport plane, the Marines say it can carry up to 24 fully equipped troops.

The corps says it wants the Osprey badly because it can fly much faster and farther and haul more troops than helicopters. But from the beginning, there have been questions about safety and cost.

After his first defeat by the Osprey lobby, then-Defense Secretary Cheney did not retreat. Year after year in the first Bush administration, he tried to kill the program. Each time, Congress rode to the rescue. Leading the charge was Rep. Curt Weldon, a Republican from the Philadelphia suburbs and a member of the Armed Services Committee. His coalition attracted 110 House members and 15 senators.

Weldon sold the plane for its unique abilities. But he had 600 other reasons to support it: the workers at the Boeing plant in his county where the fuselage would be made.

He stitched together a patchwork of the aircraft’s constituents: lawmakers from Pennsylvania, Texas and other states where components were to be made; the United Auto Workers, which had thousands of jobs at stake; the contractors, with campaign funds to deploy; and even corporate patrons like Donald Trump who were tantalized by the Osprey’s potential commercial use for short-hop commutes.

The Marines were there too, though discreetly, given that the secretary of Defense had lined up on the other side. They offered firm encouragement but treaded very carefully, Weldon said at the time.

There were letter-writing campaigns and full-page ads and newsletters and fund-raising receptions. A lobbying day in 1990 -- “Tilt-Rotor Appreciation Day” -- featured an Osprey, painted red, white and blue, hovering over the U.S. Capitol steps as lawmakers cheered.

The corps got help from friends like Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), a former Marine drill instructor and by then the chairman of the Defense Appropriations subcommittee. He stressed both the Osprey’s tactical flexibility and its civilian utility.

The Marines hope to eventually buy 360 Ospreys. If it’s proven safe, the Navy and Air Force are to get a total of 98 more. The price per aircraft, which has escalated rapidly, is estimated at $68.4 million. The total cost of the program is expected to reach $46 billion.

More Crashes

As with the Harrier, victory on the Hill was soon followed by disasters in the air.

In 1991, two Marines were injured when an Osprey prototype crashed three minutes into one of its first flights. The cause was identified as wiring problems in the flight instruments.

Then in 1992, an Osprey plunged into the Potomac River while approaching a base in Quantico, Va. The crash, caused by an engine fire, killed all seven on board -- three Marine crew members and four Boeing employees.

History seemed to be repeating itself. Like the Harrier, the Osprey was proving to be low in reliability, high in maintenance and tricky to handle when moving from horizontal to vertical flight.

But the Osprey’s safety problems did not become a political issue until the two crashes in 2000 drew widespread attention.

The Arizona crash in April 2000 killed four crew members and 15 other Marines who had been loaded onto the Osprey for an evacuation training exercise. It was one of the deadliest military disasters in years, and some questioned why the corps would put so many Marines on an aircraft still in testing.

“It was not considered a risk,” said Capt. Joseph Kloppel, a corps spokesman. The Marines had carried troops in the Osprey safely many times before the crash, he said.

“If we hadn’t lost so many Marines in that accident, the overall impact ... would not have been as severe,” said Pitman, an Osprey proponent who has advised Bell Helicopter, one of the manufacturing partners.

Investigators said the primary cause of the accident was that the pilot had exceeded the recommended rate of descent, creating a sharp updraft of turbulence that caused one of the rotors to lose lift. Any helicopter can encounter this phenomenon, known as vortex ring state, but some aviation experts say the Osprey’s design makes recovery more difficult.

To save time and money, tests that would have provided more information about vortex ring state had been canceled, postponed or conducted in flight simulators rather than on the aircraft itself, the General Accounting Office discovered after the crash. The agency said the Osprey was “far less reliable” than it needed to be for active service.

Retired Marine Col. Nolan Schmidt, who managed the Osprey program at the time, said the corps believed the aircraft was safe despite the lack of testing.

The December 2000 crash that killed Sweaney and three others prompted the Osprey’s grounding just as the Pentagon was about to decide on whether to proceed with full production.

Investigators said the accident was caused by a combination of a failed hydraulic line and a software glitch. The Marines had been told about the hydraulic design flaw months earlier. Investigators later said the software problem could have been detected with more rigorous testing.

Things only got worse when the Pentagon’s inspector general reported in July 2001 that the V-22 squadron at New River, N.C., had falsified maintenance and readiness records in an effort to improve the Osprey’s image. Three officers were disciplined.

With the Osprey program now hovering precariously, Weldon revived the tilt-rotor coalition, while the Marines declared their allegiance to the plane.

“I don’t think that there’s any other aircraft out there anywhere for the money that would do the mission for the Marine Corps,” said Lt. Gen. Fred McCorkle, then head of Marine aviation.

A special panel appointed by the Defense secretary studied the Osprey and reported last year that the aircraft is still viable and that its problems can be solved through better pilot training and modest redesigns of its hydraulic and computer systems.

“All of the things that were wrong with this airplane have been fixed,” Marine Col. Dan Schultz, the current V-22 program manager, said when the upgraded aircraft resumed testing in May.

Schultz said the highly scrutinized flight test program will spend up to a year defining where vortex ring state begins and ends and developing warnings for pilots. He said the Marines intend to prove that the V-22 is less susceptible to this condition than helicopters.

But after two decades in development, Defense Undersecretary Edward C. “Pete” Aldridge Jr., the Pentagon’s top acquisition official, said in August that he remained doubtful the Osprey could overcome inherent design and engineering challenges and demonstrate its readiness for battle.

“I’m probably the most skeptical person in the Department of Defense,” Aldridge said. “I’ve got some real problems with the airplane.”

Joint Strike Fighter

The Pentagon faced a looming crisis in the early 1990s: where to find money to replace an array of aging combat jets.

The Air Force and Navy each were seeking budget-busting fighter planes. The Marines, meanwhile, were pursuing a next-generation attack jet that, like its predecessor, would fly vertically.

“I was convinced that the Congress was not going to allow the Marine Corps to build an airplane just for itself,” said retired Lt. Gen. Harold W. Blot, who served as chief of Marine aviation in the mid-1990s.

Then the Marines got a break.

The Clinton administration’s solution was to create an affordable plane with common features that could be tailored to the needs of the Air Force, Navy and Marines, as well as U.S. allies. The Navy and Air Force were lukewarm to the idea, at best. For the Marines, participation hung on one condition: Like the Harrier, their new plane had to be short-takeoff-and-vertical-landing, or STOVL (pronounced STO-vul).

When the Pentagon agreed to the new Joint Strike Fighter, the Marines emerged as its most ardent advocate.

Their vertical model also enticed the British and other foreign partners. England committed $2 billion to the program as an international sponsor, reinforcing the administration’s cost-saving initiative.

After surviving hard-fought challenges to the Osprey and Harrier, the Marines got the go-ahead for their third vertical aircraft without so much as a skirmish.

“The Marines were steadfast in wanting it,” said former Assistant Defense Secretary Ted Warner. “Nobody was challenging it.”

Once the Marine imperative to buy STOVL aircraft was established in the battle for the AV-8B, the opposition grew muted, said another former defense official.

“People did not want to re-fight those old battles,” the official said. “It was more a matter of we have these and we’ve got to replace them.”

What remains uncertain, though, is how many of the vertical strike fighters the Marines will get and whether they will be able to fly them from Navy aircraft carriers.

The Navy and Marines have agreed to closely coordinate their aviation programs. But they haven’t agreed on whether the Marines should fly their own or the Navy’s version of the strike fighter off the carriers.

If there were concerns about the strike fighter’s vertical technology, the Marines say, the manufacturer, Lockheed Martin Corp., assuaged them last year in a dramatic demonstration of an innovative new propulsion system.

A strike fighter prototype lifted off the tarmac in the Mojave Desert and hovered briefly, proving the system could work.

Lockheed’s design uses a large fan in the fuselage to augment the engine, and the combination is expected to produce nearly twice the thrust of the Harrier with less stress on the engine. The fan’s thrust won’t generate heat like the engine does, which can burn up ship decks or airstrips while landing and taking off.

With its trapezoidal wings, twin tail and sleek frame, the single-seat attack jet will carry more bombs and travel greater distances without refueling than the AV-8B.

It is being designed to fly at supersonic speeds and to evade radar. Its sophisticated computer software and avionics should make it easier to handle. It will have the latest sensors to detect problems in flight.

Even though the Marines alone will fly the vertical version of the Joint Strike Fighter, officials say it will have enough in common with the other models to avoid the scarcity of spare parts and tools that hampered the sole-service Harrier.

The Marines say their $48-million strike fighter will allow them to fly off short-deck ships and out of small, remote landing strips, at least tripling the number of bases available to them worldwide. The plane is expected to remain in service until mid-century.

But as with the Harrier, the Marines will make trade-offs in performance for the strike fighter’s unique abilities.

The lift fan will take up fuel storage space and add weight, which will reduce the distance the Marine version can fly or how many bombs it can carry on a given mission.

While the Marine strike fighter is expected to be safer than the AV-8B, some say it is likely to be more accident-prone than the Navy and Air Force models.

Christopher Bolkcom, a military aviation analyst with the Congressional Research Service, said the new propulsion system is far more complicated than the Harrier’s, so there is more that could go wrong.

Other defense analysts say the plane’s intended role in battle is increasingly being carried out by laser-guided bombs, unmanned drones and combat planes that loiter over the battlefield.

“We’re pursuing the STOVL version of the Joint Strike Fighter because the Marines want it,” said Daniel Goure, a former Pentagon official and now vice president of the Lexington Institute think tank of Arlington, Va.

“That is distinct from whether they actually need it.”

The fear, of course, is that a new generation of vertical aircraft could lead to a new generation of casualties.

With the Joint Strike Fighter in early development and other vertical aircraft only being contemplated, it is too soon to know.

The Marines say their decision to seek their own special air wing will one day be vindicated.

They say their strike fighter will fulfill the Harrier’s potential, and the Osprey will rise above its early missteps and prove itself invaluable.

There will be times when the United States will need vertical aircraft to move troops and protect them on unforeseen battle fronts.

And then, Marine leaders say, the investment -- in lives, in dollars, in political capital -- will pay off.

Marine Commandant James L. Jones earlier this year predicted that the “best days are still ahead” for vertical aviation. Others question whether its day will ever come.

“It’s a dream that’s been around a long, long time,” said Franklin C. “Chuck” Spinney, a tactical air analyst in the Pentagon, “that’s never delivered on its promise.”

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* Part I

“The Widow-Maker”: Deaths in training, disappointment in combat.

* Part II

Causes: What could go wrong has gone wrong with the Harrier.

* Part III

Casualties: One pilot’s story. The Marines who have died in the Harrier.

* Today

Clout: The corps has fought hard to keep its

vertical vision alive.

Today on the Web: For Harrier videos, photos, cockpit view and more, go to www.latimes.com/harrier*

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PART IV: CLOUT

Times staff writers Alan C. Miller in Washington and Kevin Sack in Atlanta reported and wrote this series. Director of computer analysis Richard O’Reilly provided database analysis. Substantial assistance was provided by researchers Janet Lundblad in Los Angeles, Lianne Hart in Houston and Robert Patrick in Washington. Also contributing were Times staff writers Tony Perry in San Diego, and Marjorie Miller and Janet Stobart in London.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Many former Marines have gone on to serve in Congress, often on committees overseeing military interests. Many former generals have become executives, consultants or lobbyists for the companies that build Marine aircraft.

REP. JOHN P. MURTHA

Corps: 1952 to 1955, and 1966 to 1967; and as a reservist from 1955 to 1966, and 1967 to 1990.

Congress: Pennsylvania Democratic representative, 1974 to present. Appropriations Committee, ranking member and former chairman of the defense subcommittee. Murtha was instrumental in restoring funding for the V-22 Osprey in the late 1980s while a member of the Marine Corps Reserve, and again in the 1990s. He is a former Marine drill instructor.

FORMER SEN. JOHN GLENN

Corps: 1943 to 1965. NASA astronaut from 1959 to 1964.

Congress: Ohio Democratic senator from 1975 to his retirement in 1999. Armed Services Committee for 14 years. Glenn was a key supporter of the Harrier and the Osprey when each faced battles within the Pentagon. He flew in both aircraft and was particularly influential given his aviation background. He is a close friend of retired Lt. Gen. Thomas H. Miller, a founding father of the Harrier program and a key Marine proponent of vertical aircraft.

SEN. JOHN W. WARNER

Corps: 1950 to 1952. Ground officer with 1st Marine Air Wing in South Korea. After active service, remained in Marine Reserve for 10 years. Also served in the Navy from 1945 to 1946.

Congress: Virginia Republican senator from 1979 to present. Armed Services Committee, former chairman who is due to regain the post in January. Has supported Marine aviation programs, including the Osprey.

FORMER SEN. CHARLES S. ROBB

Corps: 1961 to 1970, and as a reservist from 1970 to 1991.

Congress: Virginia Democratic senator who served two terms before losing reelection bid in 2000. Armed Services Committee member. Known as a staunch Marine ally. Two years ago he called the Joint Strike Fighter “critical” for the Navy and Marines, and spoke of the importance of deploying the Osprey. “Robb always had his door open for me,” said retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni.

REP. LANE EVANS

Corps: 1969 to 1971.

Congress: Illinois Democratic representative was elected in 1982. Armed Services Committee member since 1988. Evans is a supporter of the Marine Corps’ Osprey program.

*

From the Corps to the Corp.

FORMER MARINES IN INDUSTRY

TERRENCE R. DAKE

Corps: Retired as a four-star general in 2000 after serving as assistant commandant and heading Marine aviation. A 34-year veteran, Dake flew the Osprey in 1997 and called it an important step “in modernizing Marine Corps aviation for the battlefields of the 21st century.”

Corp.: Senior vice president for U.S. government and international programs for Bell Helicopter, including the Osprey program.

RICHARD D. HEARNEY

Corps: Retired as a four-star general in 1996 after serving as assistant commandant and chief of Marine aviation. A 34-year veteran, he was a member of the first Harrier squadron and one of the plane’s major proponents. His son was killed in a British Harrier in 1994.

Corp.: Three years as vice president in Boeing Co.’s business development office, where he worked closely with the firm’s Washington lobbyists. He remains a consultant to Boeing.

FRED McCORKLE

Corps: Retired as a lieutenant general in 2001 after serving as the chief of Marine aviation. A 35-year veteran, McCorkle flew about 6,500 hours in helicopters and jets and became an ardent defender of the Osprey program.

Corp.: Joined the board of Rolls-Royce of North America last year.

MICHAEL D. RYAN

Corps: Retired as a major general in 1998. A 31-year Marine veteran, Ryan flew the Harrier for 25 years and served as a Marine wing commander.

Corp.: Executive vice president of government business for Rolls-Royce of North America. Rolls-Royce makes the Harrier’s engine as well as components for the Osprey and Joint Strike Fighter. Ryan runs the company’s Washington office, including its lobbying efforts.

CHARLES H. PITMAN

Corps: Retired as a lieutenant general in 1990. A 38-year veteran, Pitman flew jets and helicopters before becoming chief of Marine aviation. Though a supporter of vertical flight, he criticized the Harrier’s safety record and stalled the purchase of the last planes.

Corp.: Has worked as a consultant for various defense firms, including Bell Helicopter. Has advised Bell on the tactical importance of tilt-rotor technology.

Sources: Congressional Quarterly’s “Politics in America,” “The Complete Marquis Who’s Who,” lawmakers’ official biographies, lobbying disclosure reports and interviews.

Researched by Times staff writers Alan C. Miller and Kevin Sack and news researchers Janet Lundblad and Robert Patrick

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Vertical flight: past and future

‘71 -- First AV-8A is delivered to Marines. Shortly thereafter, it suffers its first crash and fatality.

‘74-’77 -- Twenty-six Harriers are lost to crashes, killing nine Marines.

‘81 -- V-22 program is launched.

‘84 -- AV-8B enters the fleet.

‘86 -- Osprey wins initial Pentagon approval.

‘86 -- The U.S. and Britain agree to jointly pursue a supersonic successor to the Harrier.

‘90 -- AV-8B has 11 major accidents, two of them fatal.

‘91 -- Osprey prototype crashes, injuring two.

‘92 -- An Osprey crashes into Potomac River, killing seven.

‘95 -- The Pentagon initiates a sweeping program to replace Air Force, Navy and Marine attack and fighter planes with a sophisticated, affordable jet that can elude enemy radar.

‘99 -- Seven accidents push AV-8B’s Class A mishap rate to a 12-year high.

‘00 -- Osprey crash in Arizona kills 19 Marines. Another crash in North Carolina kills four.

‘01 -- Lockheed Martin wins Joint Strike Fighter contract over Boeing in a flyoff competition.

‘07 -- The Marine Corps hopes to begin replacing its troop transport helicopters with Ospreys.

‘10 -- The Marine Corps expects to begin replacing AV-8Bs with Joint Strike Fighters.

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Sources: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Federation of American Scientists, Flight International

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Researched by Times graphics reporter Joel Greenberg and

Times director of computer analysis Richard O’Reilly