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Many of the parts for the V-22 Osprey are fabricated at the company's Fort Worth plant.

Every type of helicopter and airplane has experienced crashes, including fatal crashes, especially during development. But for the V-22, which miraculously had survived the deaths of so many Marines, the bodies were finally piling up too high to be ignored.

Sweaney's death forced Bell to stop flying the tilt-rotor aircraft. Shortly afterward, the Defense Department appointed a special commission to review the V-22's overall safety and reliability. The so-called "blue ribbon panel," however, was stocked with former Marines as well as Norman Augustine, the former chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin. In its report in 2001, the panel recommended that the military continue developing the aircraft at low levels because it had shown that it could achieve many of the performance targets outlined by the Pentagon. But the commission also found that the V-22 "fell short of requirements for reliability, availability, and maintainability, suggesting that the aircraft and its logistics support system have not yet matured to the point of adequate supportability." In other words, the V-22 might be a great aircraft someday -- if it could ever be made to work properly.

Helicopters are inherently unstable machines. They are far more complicated than airplanes and crash far more often. What makes the V-22 so scary is that it attempts to marry the helicopter with the airplane by executing a very tricky maneuver: First, leave the earth in helicopter mode. Then, while hovering the aircraft, smoothly rotate two 6000-horsepower turbine engines, along with their rapidly spinning 38-foot-wide rotors, from the vertical to the horizontal position. Do this while at the same time keeping aloft an aircraft weighing about 50,000 pounds. Fly the machine for a while, then reverse the process to land.

To pull that rabbit out of the hat, the V-22 uses sophisticated hydraulic pumps and high-pressure lines to swivel the engine/rotor assembly around. Those lines have proven susceptible to failure, which sends the aircraft to the ground in a hurry. And then there are the V-22's exotic materials. The V-22 is made mostly of a high-tech carbon fiber composite that is stronger and lighter than steel but also expensive and difficult to maintain.

While all those things are important, one the V-22's biggest drawbacks is even more basic: physics.

Ever since helicopters were invented, pilots have been dealing with a phenomenon called power settling, or vortex ring state. When rotorcraft hover in one place or descend rapidly, the rotors sometimes churn the air so thoroughly that the blades lose their ability to "grip" the air and provide lift. Pilots found that their machines, even operating at full power, could suddenly fall several dozen, or even several hundred, feet with little warning.

With helicopters, this problem can be overcome fairly easily. The pilot tilts the machine forward and flies out of the disturbed air column. If the pilot is too close to the ground to recover from vortex ring state, the helicopter hits the ground hard -- but usually upright. That's not the case with the V-22. In the V-22, vortex ring state usually affects one rotor or the other, not both. That's bad. If one of the rotors suddenly cannot provide lift but the other one does, then the V-22 likes to roll over on its side or its back, positions that are not conducive to safe flying, particularly if the earth is nearby. The DOD's 2001 report on the V-22 said this "asymmetric vortex ring state" poses a "higher risk of adverse outcome if it happens at low altitude."

In this case, "adverse outcome" often means a smoldering ruin filled with dead people. Bell and the Pentagon claim that they have solved the problem with vortex ring state. But many critics say otherwise. The V-22's excessive weight (more than 20 tons) and unusual design exacerbate the problem.

"They can't get away from the problem of vortex ring state," said Franklin "Chuck" Spinney, a vocal gadfly who worked inside the Defense Department for 34 years before retiring in mid-2003. Spinney's expertise was in tactical aircraft development, and he gained a name for himself by throwing budgetary grenades at wasteful defense spending projects. Spinney insists that the V-22 is doomed by the problem of vortex ring state. "It's physics," he said. "They can't fix it. End of story."

Perhaps the most dogged analysis of the V-22 has been done by a retired Air Force colonel named Harry Dunn. Now living in Virginia, Dunn heads a group of aviators and engineers known as the "red ribbon panel." A former helicopter pilot, he has been investigating the aircraft for more than three years. From the outset, he said, the attitude of the Marines, Bell, and Boeing toward the V-22 has been "let's build the thing and then fix it later." But like Spinney, Dunn doesn't think it can be fixed. The V-22 is "a crippled albatross, which will continue killing" unless it is stopped, he said. A key problem is the V-22's inability to perform what pilots call "autorotation"--that's the ability of helicopters to glide to the earth in an emergency. If a helicopter's engine fails or gets damaged by enemy fire, it can often land safely because, as the helicopter descends, its rotor blades continue spinning. The spinning blades create lift, which slows the aircraft's descent. The V-22's design effectively prevents autorotation. That means that if the engines on a V-22 fail while it hovers at low altitude, it falls like a rock, and its occupants are much more likely to die.

While Dunn and other Pentagon insiders fight the V-22 program, Bell and Boeing are working the halls of Congress. In 2000 (the last year for which figures are readily available), Textron spent nearly $4.7 million on its lobby effort -- putting it in the top 40 of all companies in lobbying expenditures. And that's not even counting Boeing's spending. In 2000, Boeing spent $8.2 million on lobbying --the most of any defense contractor and more than all but 13 other companies. Between 1997 and 2000, Bell and Boeing's lobbying expenditures added up to a combined $52 million.

The lobbying appears to be paying off. Despite the fatal crashes, despite ongoing flight problems, despite the fact that the V-22 cannot carry a full load of 24 battle-ready soldiers, the airplane continues to get enormous amounts of taxpayer money. In his 2004 defense budget, the biggest since the end of the Cold War, President George W. Bush agreed to spend another $1.1 billion to build 11 more V-22s.

The money continues to flow despite astounding cost increases. In 1987, the Pentagon assumed it would purchase 913 V-22s at a cost of about $33.2 billion. By December 2001, according to figures from the General Accounting Office, the number of aircraft had shrunk to 458, but the total cost of the program had increased to $42.6 billion. That means that the price per Osprey has gone from about $36 million in the early days of the program to about $100 million.

Everest Riccioni, a retired Air Force colonel, is another V-22 critic. An aeronautical engineer, he was one of the midwives of the F-16, widely acknowledged as perhaps the best fighter aircraft ever built. In a study paid for by the Air Force, Riccioni found that the V-22 would be far less capable than the Marines were claiming and that the Corps was having trouble maintaining and keeping the V-22s ready to fly. Perhaps his most important finding was that a conventional modern helicopter would be three times more cost-effective than the V-22. He also predicted that despite its love of the V-22, the Marine Corps "must inevitably buy a fleet of modern helicopters to make up for the Osprey's many operational defects and shortcomings."

U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison doesn't see any defects in the V-22, and she may be the most powerful Texan in the Capitol when it comes to defense spending. A member of the Senate Appropriations Committee and that committee's powerful Defense Subcommittee, she is not overly worried about the V-22's cost or safety issues. "I would never support anything wherever it was made if it couldn't be found safe," Hutchison told the Texas Observer during a press conference in May. "But in fact, the opposite is true ... . The Marine Corps feels very confident that it is safe, and I will not support it if it isn't. But I am told that it is. And they are comfortable that they have found what the problem was." She did not answer a question regarding the V-22's cost.

It's not at all clear that the V-22's problems have been fixed, however. Indeed, the aircraft continues to flounder in a testing program that began shortly after the 2000 crash that killed Sweaney. Last November, as a V-22 was trying to land aboard a U.S. Navy ship, the aircraft became dangerously unstable, swinging rapidly from side to side. The oscillations continued until the pilot released the controls and allowed the V-22's computer to take over the aircraft. In February of this year, Bell spokesman Bob Leder told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that the incident on the ship showed that "further refinements to the flight-control software and hardware are necessary." In March, a brand-new V-22 flying from the Bell plant in Amarillo to North Carolina was forced to make an emergency landing at Dobbins Air Force Base in Georgia after the aircraft's emergency lubrication lights came on. The malfunction reportedly kept the aircraft grounded at the base for several days. And just a few days ago, according to news reports, a V-22 was forced to land on an aircraft carrier when a blower that cools the rotor system's oil disintegrated.

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