A fascinating and authoritative narrative History of the V-22 Osprey, revealing the inside story of the most controversial piece of military hardware ever developed for the U.
S.
These stories, including never before published eyewitness accounts of the crashes that made the Osprey notorious, not only chronicle an extraordinary chapter in Marine Corps history, but also provide a fascinating look at a machine that could still revolutionize air travel..
He reveals the methods, motives, and obsessions of those who designed, sold, bought, flew, and fought for the tiltrotor.
Whittle takes the reader from the halls of the Pentagon and Congress to the war zone of Iraq, from the engineer\'s drafting table to the cockpits of the civilian and Marine pilots who risked their lives flying the Osprey--and sometimes lost them.
Based on in-depth research and hundreds of interviews, The Dream Machine recounts the Marines\' quarter-century struggle to get the Osprey into combat.
They still refused to abandon the Osprey, even after the Corps\' own proud reputation was tarnished by a national scandal over accusations that a commander had ordered subordinates to lie about the aircraft\'s problems.
Then two crashes killed twenty-three Marines.
The Marines were eager to put it into service anyway.
Opponents called it one of the worst boondoggles in Pentagon history.
By 2000, the Osprey was nine years late and billions over budget, bedeviled by technological hurdles, business rivalries, and an epic political battle over whether to build it at all.
The Marines saw it as key to their very survival.
Many predicted it would reshape civilian aviation.
The tiltrotor was the aviation equivalent of finding the Northwest Passage: an aircraft able to take off, land, and hover with the agility of a helicopter yet fly as fast and as far as an airplane.
When the Marines decided to buy a helicopter-airplane hybrid tiltrotor called the V-22 Osprey, they saw it as their Dream machine.
Marine Corps.
A fascinating and authoritative narrative History of the V-22 Osprey, revealing the inside story of the most controversial piece of military hardware ever developed for the U.
S
