Lessons from a Wounded Bird
“You laid it out very reasonably and rationally. I guess that’s what REAL reporters do.“
– Jon Stewart on Rick Whittle’s evenhanded and impartial approach to telling the story of the notorious V-22.
Watch Rick on “The Daily Show” 
BOOK REVIEW: “The Dream Machine, The Untold History of the Notorious V-22 Osprey“
By Richard Whittle
Simon & Schuster. 454 pp. $27
A Darn Good Yarn
What’s great about Rick Whittle’s new book, “The Dream Machine, The Untold History of the Notorious V-22 Osprey” is how it pulls back the curtain to reveal the inner machinations of Washington life.
The chapter detailing the intriguing backstory of how the CBS news magazine 60 minutes got a major scoop on the maintenance irregularities is worth the price of the book, to anyone interested how journalism operates in the major leagues.
It also helps explains the old joke: “You know you’re having a bad day, when Mike Wallace and a 60 minutes crews shows up outside your door.” As if that needed explanation. Still you might be surprised at how a classic 60 minutes exposé is born.
Whittle is a former Dallas Morning News reporter, who covered the Osprey from the dark days when it appeared it might truly earn the pejorative nickname “widow-maker”. And what he excels at is balance and context. He pulls no punches, but takes no cheap shots either.
The result is truly readable book that spins a fascinating yarn of science, politics, and intrigue.
Back in 2007, as the Marine Corps was preparing to deploy the revolutionary tilt-rotor aircraft to Iraq, Commandant Gen. James Conway sought to inoculate the Corps again the worst case: “I’ll tell you, there is going to be a crash. That’s what airplanes do over time.”
It was sadly prophetic. Earlier this month, as copies of the book “The Dream Machine” were being shipped to distributors, a V-22 crashed in Afghanistan killing four people, including one civilian. We still don’t know if it was shot down, suffered a mechanical problem, or if there was a pilot error. So the jury is still out on the “Dream Machine,” but in telling the tale of how the heli-plane survived setbacks that would have killed most over-budget defense programs, Whittle provides window on how Washington, the Pentagon, and the Defense industry really work, and Whittle’s easy writing style makes the brisk narrative appealing to the novice and aviation expert alike.
And mercifully he left out the of the history my own small part in the V-22’s notorious history: I have the honor of being an aviation pioneer, the first civilian to go into what I like to call “reverse thruster mode” on the Osprey. And I kept the barf bag to prove it.
Tags: Dream Machine, Osprey, Richard Whittle, V-22
