The Pentagon is confident it has a winner. If all goes well, the evaluation will end in July and construction of the fleet will begin in 2006, and the first Osprey squadron will fly in fall 2007. At military bases across the country, from New River Marine Corps Air Base in North Carolina to Edwards Air Force Base in California, pilots and engineers are testing the plane under combat conditions: extreme heat and cold, desert sand, high-altitude flying, aircraft carrier takeoffs.
After an intense few years of engineering and test flights, years of tearing the plane apart and putting it back together under a fix-it-or-kill-it threat from the Pentagon, the Osprey is back. The Osprey made it to op-eval once before, five years ago, and failed spectacularly. Now the weird hybrid plane has entered a critical test phase called operational evaluation - the last hurdle before full production. It was a tilt-rotor hybrid - equal parts helicopter and plane, able to take off vertically and hover like a helo and then swivel its tilt-rotor pods (called nacelles) forward to fly like a traditional fixed wing.īut it never went away, propped up by genuine need, pork barrel politics, and the hope that the money already spent wasn’t money wasted. When he was working for Henry Kissinger on the National Security Council in the 1970s, he saw photographs of a curious-looking experimental aircraft called the XV-15. Incoming Navy secretary John Lehman, a pilot during the Vietnam War, thought he had an answer. The Sea Stallion and its 1960s-era cousin, the CH-46 Sea Knight, were too slow and, in their old age, had become maintenance nightmares and safety hazards. The fiasco at Desert One in 1980 highlighted the Pentagon’s need to replace its antiquated fleet of transport helicopters. Both aircraft burst into flames eight servicemen die. He banks back to the right and collides with the C-130, his rotors slicing into the transport plane’s fuselage. The pilot lifts off, banks left, and loses his bearings in a welter of dust and downwash. As the aircraft prepare to evacuate, one Sea Stallion shifts position on the airstrip to allow a C-130 to take off. Only five fully functioning helicopters reach the airstrip.Ĭoncerned that the mission is too hobbled to succeed, President Carter orders the team to abort. A second reports gyro failure and turns back.
One Sea Stallion drops out after a warning light flashes. Somewhere over the desert, they get trapped in a large haboob, a storm of dust as fine as talc.
The helicopters enter Iranian airspace below 200 feet to avoid radar detection.
The Vietnam-era Sea Stallions have limited range and cannot refuel in-air. The helicopters are there to carry Delta Force commandos 270 miles to a staging area in the mountains outside Tehran, then raid the embassy the next night. Their clandestine mission, Operation Eagle Claw, is to rescue 53 Americans held hostage in the US embassy in Tehran.Īt the airstrip, codenamed Desert One, six bumblebee-shaped C-130 Hercules transport planes wait to refuel the Sea Stallions. Eight RH-53D Sea Stallion transport helicopters lift off in twilight from the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Nimitz in the Gulf of Oman, bound for a makeshift airstrip 600 miles away in the middle of Iran’s Dasht-e-Kavir desert.
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