Infrequent flyer: how the Marines spent thirty years and $30 billion on the V-22 Osprey, an aircraft that's barely fit for combat.

• Author: Thompson, Mark
• Position: The Dream Machine: The Untold History of the Notorious V-22 Osprey - Book review

The Dream Machine: The Untold History of the Notorious V-22 Osprey

by Richard Whittle

Simon and Schuster, 394 pp.

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April 25, 1980, dawned bleak in Washington. Americans awakened to the news that Operation Eagle Claw, a mission to rescue fifty-three hostages held by Tehran and its newly ascendant mullahs, had failed disastrously, killing eight U.S. troops and seemingly confirming Jimmy Carter's reputation as a bumbling commander in chief. But while Carter took responsibility for the fiasco in the Iranian desert, the mishap was as much technological as it was managerial. The original plan had been to free the hostages by clandestinely ferrying an elite Delta Force team to Tehran with helicopters launched from a remote staging ground in south-central Iran, dubbed Desert One. But the helicopters fell short of the task, and the mission was aborted when too many of them broke down. In their rush to return home, two aircraft collided and exploded in a fireball that killed eight of the ten servicemen on board. When news of the tragedy broke, I was a Washington correspondent for the Fort Worth StarTelegram, and I managed to track down Texas Senator John Tower, a senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, in his hideaway office in the Capitol's rotunda. "Never again!" a not-altogether-sober Tower pledged.

There was considerable fallout from Desert One: Cyrus Vance resigned as secretary of state, and Congress created the U.S. Special Operations Command, over the Pentagon's opposition, to overcome the interservice rivalries that had contributed to the debacle. Another legacy was an effort to build a new kind of aircraft, one capable of landing and taking off almost anywhere, like a helicopter, but also able to fly long distances without refueling, like an airplane--a craft eventually called the V-22 Osprey. With its tilting rotors and engines, the V-22 would combine the best of both types of flight; most importantly, its ability to make lightning strikes deep inside enemy territory would ensure there would never be another Desert One.

In his new book, The Dream Machine, Richard Whittle, former Pentagon correspondent for the Dallas Morning News, tells the long, costly, and bloody tale of this hybrid bird, which has taken thirty years--as well as thirty lives and $30 billion, so far--to go from blueprints to battlefield. Whittle takes the reader from the aircraft's birthplace in Fort Worth to its first combat...