The Little Helicopters That Couldn't

Growth of government isn’t just steady. Sometimes it seem exponential …

Not long ago we heard a report on the radio about the new helicopter that might or might not be arriving in Washington, DC, designated Marine One. The story claimed that the new bird would cost $150,000,000. I thought it could not possibly be true—I mean, how can you spend that much money on a helicopter? Make it out of solid gold? Carve it out of a big diamond? So I researched it a little. I found some interesting history, and I will now share it with you.

We all know about Air Force One which, most often, is actually one of two greatly modified Boeing VC-25s, the military version of the 747. Any plane the president is riding in is called Air Force One. It wasn’t always that way.

FDR was the first president to fly in a plane while in office. It was a Boeing 314 flying boat, the famous “Clipper,” the plane that Indiana Jones boarded in Raiders of the Lost Ark. But that was just for the trip to the Casablanca conference. The first aircraft dedicated to presidential transportation was a C-54 Skymaster, the military version of the DC-4. They called the plane the Sacred Cow. I don’t know why.

Harry Truman replaced it with a C-118 Liftmaster, a military version of the DC-6, called the Independence. (I flew on a DC-6 once, from Houston to Nederland, Texas. One noisy sonuvabitch!)

The first planes to operate with the designation of Air Force One were during Eisenhower’s administration, and it came about because of a near disaster when a commercial plane, Eastern Flight 8610, was directed into the same airspace as Air Force 8610, with Eisenhower aboard. From then on, any plane carrying the president was Air Force One. Ike was the first to expand the presidential fleet, with two Lockheed C-121 Constellations, named Columbine I and Columbine II. He supplemented them with two little Aero Commanders for short hops.

And we were off to the races. Now we had not just a presidential aircraft, but a real fleet dedicated just to flying the president wherever he needed to go. And Ike didn’t stop there. He added three of the new Boeing 707 passenger jets: SAM 970, 971, and 972. Dude had seven airplanes now.

The Constellations were quickly retired, and JFK had to make do with just the three jets, plus the Aero Commanders for little trips to Hyannis Port or wherever Marilyn Monroe was bedded down for the night. But not for long. He obtained a long-range version of the 707, designated VC-137C SAM 26000. That was the plane where LBJ was sworn in, the one that carried Kennedy’s body back to Washington. It’s at an air museum in Ohio now.

LBJ added another long-range 707 to the fleet, and that’s how things stood until Ronald Reagan took office. He ordered two 747s, the honkin’est big airplane in America. You’ve seen it as a location in countless movies, from “The West Wing” to … well, to Air Force One. (I wonder if there’s a standing Air Force One set somewhere in Hollywood?) The Gypper never got to ride in these flying luxury hotel/office buildings; that honor went to George Aitch-Dubya. They cost what was seen as a staggering amount in 1990: $350,000,000 a pop.

The Air Force says they intend to retire the two old 747s by 2017 and replace them with three new planes: either 747-800s, Boeing 787 Dreamliners, or A380 Airbuses. These are the two-story behemoths that are forcing airports all over the world to strengthen their runways and build massive new boarding gates. (But don’t worry, it’ll never happen. Can you imagine the stink in Congress if we bought a European plane for the president to ride in? Why not get a fleet of Hyundai or Toyota limos while we’re at it?) Why do they need three new planes when two have served well for two decades? I don’t know. Ask your congressperson. How much will they cost? I haven’t found an estimate, but whenever the government makes one public, double it. Then double it again. You won’t be far wrong, I guarantee you. I would be stunned if they ended up costing less than a billion dollars each. I’d easily believe three billion dollars each. I’d believe five billion each. I suspect you could buy a pretty big aircraft carrier for that.

This has been a long digression from the story about the new helicopter which may or may not be costing you $150,000,000 … but I hope you enjoyed it! And all this research has led me to the figure I was looking for, which is the aforementioned $350,000,000 for one 747. ($700,000,000 for the two … or do you think Boeing offered a discount: buy one, get the second at half price!) (Nah.)

It just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me that you can get a souped-up 747 for that price, and then pay $150 Big Ones for a helicopter.

Well, rest easy, my fellow Americans. This helicopter is not going to cost $150,000,000.

It’s going to cost $400,000,000.

And that’s not all the good news, either. That’s just the price for one of them, and you will not be buying just one of them. You’ll be happy to learn that you’ll be buying 28 of them. My calculator reported to me (rather incredulously, I thought) that the price tag for this fleet of plush executive penis-substitutes will come to $11,000,000,000. But consider this:

The original order was for 23 aircraft, and development was to cost $1.7 billion (2005). What with one thing and another—my guess is the addition of things like million-dollar stealth wiper blades, solid gold toilet seats, upgraded servants quarters, Xboxes at every seat, you know the drill—that phase ended up costing $2.4 billion. Project cost went from $6.1 billion (this is what they expected to pay, for 23 choppers; $265 million per whirlybird) to seven billion and change, to the 2008 estimate of eleven gigabux. Somewhere in there five more helicopters got added into the pot, possibly because a 3 looks very much like an 8 in poor lighting … and what the hell? You gonna get all hot and bothered over one lousy two-billion-dollar typo?

But since the project is still in development and even in a best case scenario would not actually fly any VIPs from point A to point B until 2010—and Rule One in military procurement is that the best case never happens—I predict that it will cost even more than that in the end. These things always do, as the manufacturers have absolutely no incentive to save money since the Pentagon is obligated to pay absolutely any amount a defense contractor charges them, and because every colonel in Virginia has crammed his pet hare-brained helicopter project into these things, just to see if it will work. (It usually doesn’t, hence the cost overruns.) So what’s your best guess? Fifteen billion? Twenty billion? While we’re at it, why not three more helicopters, so that the president can have a different ride for every day of the month, including January, March, May, July, August, October, November, and December?

What I really want to know, what I suspect all Americans would like to know, is … why twenty-eight? I can see we’d need a spare, since at least one will be malfunctioning at any given time. Okay, make that three. On second thought, four. The Veep is entitled to a ride in these birds—when they would be designated as Marine Two.

And, all right already!, apparently we absolutely must have five of them, as I’ve just learned that they usually fly in formations of five with the prez in only one, a shell game to make it all more interesting for an al-Qaeda asshole with a shoulder-fired missile.

This whole executive transport business is handled by the Marine Helicopter Squadron One (HMX-1), based in Quantico, Virginia. Aside from testing new helicopter designs, which I understand is a fairly small part of their mission these days, that’s all they do. Eight hundred highly skilled marines, flying and maintaining a couple dozen high-tech helicopters. It’s fairly mind-boggling when you think about it.

I’m not questioning the need for something new. Most of the current helicopters have aging airframes. And I sure want the president to have good protection: a well-armored, armed, and electronically sophisticated aircraft, especially this president, who will be a juicy target not only for foreign terrorists who would like to kill any president, but for hundreds of thousands of our home-grown racist variety of terrorist, the Timothy McVeighs of America, the KKK and Nazis and people who listen to Rush Limbaugh, and if Ann Coulter somehow obtains a surface-to-air missile … people who see this president as a raving socialist intent on destroying America, or as the anti-Christ (literally!), and/or who just don’t like the color of his skin.

 But twenty-eight of them? Eleven billion dollars (and counting) to fly two men around Washington? Because that’s pretty much the only place they will operate. When the prez goes on a trip, HMX-1 brings along a smaller helicopter, folded up and stuffed into a C-5A … which is only part of the fleet that goes wherever the chief executive travels, and god knows what that all costs, but let’s not get into it. (And I’m sure there is a VIP list of others in D.C. who get to ride in them—Pelosi? Scalia? The permanent undersecretary for bean counting?—but let’s not get into that rotten pork barrel, either. It stinks too much.) I just can’t come up with a reasonable justification for 28 helicopters.

Update

John McCain pointed out not long ago that this whole helicopter program is a classic government boondoggle, and challenged President Obama to cancel it. When Obama heard of it he simply said he was happy with the helicopter he had. Recently, Defense Secretary Gates announced that the program was one of many military boondoggles he planned to terminate, along with things like the F-22 Raptor and the next generation of Navy destroyers—both of which were designed for fighting the Soviet Union—and the Marine Corps EFV, a glorified LST which, as far as I can tell, would be just dandy for landing on Okinawa and killing a lot of Japs …

(It’s called the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, it’s a high-tech landing craft, and it’s worth an article all to itself … but it’s too depressing. Here’s a nutshell rundown: We’ve spent 10 years and $1,700,000,000 developing it. They will cost $22,000,000 each. In testing they average one operational breakdown every 4.3 hours. Hours, not days! We propose to spend about eleven billion to buy them. (By the way, we have not made an amphibious landing in decades—possibly since WWII though I’m not sure of that—but they’re sure to come in handy in Iraq, which has about 30 miles of coastline, or Afghanistan, which has none.) And, oh, yes. They leak. For this General Dynamics was paid $80 million in bonuses. Your government and military contractors at work, fellow citizens!)

This cancellation is good news … I guess. Of course, in government procurement, particularly military procurement, there is always a coating of shit on even the sweetest pill. All that money we’ve already spent on these flying turkeys? All those billions? Gone. Down the crapper. We’ll never see it again.

May 20, 2009

Hollywood, California