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

Richard Whittle's riveting narrative reveals how a venerable aviation dream became a nightmare for the Marine Corps. When the Marines decided to buy a helicopter-airplane hybrid "tiltrotor," they saw it as their dream machine. The V-22 Osprey was aviation's equivalent of finding the Northwest Passage: a vehicle able to take off and land like a helicopter but fly fast and far like an airplane. Many predicted the tiltrotor would reshape civilian aviation. The Marines saw it as key to their very survival.

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. Foes called it one of the worst boondoggles in Pentagon history. The Marines were eager to put it into service anyway. Then two crashes killed twenty-three Marines - raising the death toll in Osprey accidents to thirty. The Marines still refused to abandon it, even after their proud reputation was tarnished by a national scandal over charges that a commander had ordered subordinates to lie about the Osprey's problems.

Based on in-depth research and hundreds of interviews, The Dream Machine recounts the Marines' quarter-century struggle to get the Osprey into battle. Whittle takes the reader from the halls of the Pentagon and Congress to the war zone in Iraq, from the engineer's drafting table to the cockpits where test pilots and Marines risked their lives flying the Osprey -- and sometimes lost them. He unveils the motives, methods, and obsessions of those who designed, sold, bought, flew, and fought for the tiltrotor. With previously unpublished eyewitness accounts of the crashes that made the Osprey notorious, this book chronicles an extraordinary chapter in Marine Corps history - and provides an unvarnished look at a technology that could still revolutionize air travel.