A Crash and a Collusion?

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Last week the first of 458 V-22 Ospreys finally landed in the Pentagon's front yard, greeted by Pentagon brass and the Marine Band. But the program has had powerful critics from the start. The Bush Administration tried to kill it, saying its $79 million-a-copy price tag was too steep. The Army has refused to buy the Osprey, citing its cost. Pentagon officials acknowledge that the Cobra's crash--and Bell's role in it--could complicate the Marines' efforts to keep buying V-22s because of doubts it might raise about Bell. "If the Marines come down hard on Bell, the whole program could be called into question," says Lawrence Korb, who oversaw Pentagon logistics and personnel during the Reagan Administration.

The families of the dead aviators agree. "There's a coziness and collusion between the Marines and Bell because of the Marines' reliance on Bell," says William Straw, father of the 29-year-old Marine pilot killed in the Texas crash. The Straw family knows something about military aviation. William, a 1967 graduate of the Air Force Academy and a former test pilot, won the Distinguished Flying Cross for piloting a C-130 cargo plane through bad weather and enemy fire to resupply a beleaguered U.S. outpost in Vietnam. Both of Robert's grandfathers won that decoration in World War II. James Browne, whose son Michael, 33, perished in the Cobra's backseat, also believes the Marines' dependence on Bell has thwarted justice. "I am very disappointed in how the Marines have treated my family."

The Marines see their behavior differently. "The Marine Corps shares your grief and frustration," General T.R. Dake, the assistant commandant, wrote the Browne family last month. Yet the service has taken no action against Bell, the Marines argue, because the corps can't pinpoint the cause of the crash and therefore the responsibility for it cannot be established.

Bell and the Army, which inspects Bell's work at the plant, have blamed each other for the problems exposed in the Marine probe. "Ultimately it's [the Army's] decision to do them or not," a Bell official said of the safety fixes. "This is not our aircraft." But the Marine inquiry said Bell was "contractually responsible" for providing the crew with a safe aircraft. The Army major in charge of monitoring Bell's work concurred. "Bell is the one responsible for wrench turning," he told Marine investigators, "and for the inspection of all that."

Now the Marines are strangely revising their own findings. Last week an officer speaking on behalf of the corps told TIME that it believes pilot error caused the crash because the crew failed to glide the chopper safely to the ground with its unpowered but spinning rotor blades. That is a startling assertion, given that the official investigation contained no hint that the crew members' actions contributed to their death. It seems the Marine credo--"The risk of death has always been preferable to letting a fellow Marine down"--may have been set aside in this case.