short term, it was a good thing for Douglas, which was able to hire even more production and support personnel to deal with the existing workload.
Meanwhile, design work on the C-17 continued for some years to come, gradually transforming the old YC-15 prototype design into a larger, more powerful production design. The actual design process went well and generally on schedule and budget, but a chill was beginning to come over the C-17 program, and it almost killed the new airlifter. The change came as a result of something completely unrelated to the Globemaster program: a Justice Department/DoD investigation of contractor insider-information trading known as Operation III Wind. Ill Wind was a wide-ranging probe of Administration/contractor relationships in which government personnel would sell “insider” programmatic and technical information to contractors for a price. By the time the probe was completed, a number of DoD officials and senior contractor executives, including Undersecretary of the Navy Melvin Pasily, had been sent to jail, and huge fines had been exacted from a number of contractors.
Ill Wind had one other unpleasant effect, in that it caused almost all the military and civilian personnel assigned to manage procurement programs to take on a hostile, even adversarial, relationship against the “money- grubbing” defense contractors and their perceived “obscene” profits. Now, anyone who thinks that an 8 to 12 percent profit margin on a program as risky as the C-17 is obscene clearly is lacking some knowledge of the business world, but that was the atmosphere in the late 1980s. Then, in 1989, the wheels really fell off.
The year started in a promising fashion, with fabrication of the prototype C-17A going along, albeit with some problems. Part of these difficulties were due to the business realities of the aerospace industry at that time. Finding qualified technicians and engineers in Southern California in the late 1980s was tough, and this led to some poorly qualified personnel being brought onto the Douglas payroll at higher salaries than had been planned. This led to cost escalations which caused future acrimony between the USAF program offices and Douglas. There were problems with weight growth on the Globemaster, which is not unusual in today’s military aircraft programs. The difficulty here was that the USAF program managers were completely inflexible on
On top of all of this, those same program managers failed to inform the Office of the Secretary of Defense (Dick Cheney at the time) of the cost and engineering difficulties when his staff did a review of major aircraft programs (F-22, F-18, C-17, V-22, A-12, etc.). Only
The difficulties on C-17 took a bit longer to come out, but when they did, a firestorm erupted. Initially these took the form of financial claims by Douglas against the USAF about mandated changes that had cost them money. The Air Force came back with claims against Douglas for shortfalls in contract progress and performance, and design shortcomings. What resulted was a virtual war between the management at Douglas and the C-17 program office which just got worse and worse.
The final straw came over a required structural test of the wing. As part of the USAF-mandated weight reduction program, Douglas designers had removed several structural members from the wing to help make the goal. Unfortunately, when the engineers went back and ran their computer structural models, they discovered that the software was predicting a wing failure during a coming overload test of the wing. The test was designed to verify that the wing could sustain a 150 percent stress overload over the design requirement. Unfortunately, the engineers knew that the wing would fail at one of the “thinned out” spots at 129 percent. When Douglas reported this to the Air Force program office, they were refused permission to fix the problem prior to the test. In particular, the government program manager felt that allowing them to make the change would somehow show USAF “weakness” towards the contractor. He ordered that the test go forward, whatever the results. It did, and the wing broke precisely where the engineers had predicted, at exactly the 129 percent load. This was a patently stupid act, and it was the proverbial “straw that broke the camel’s back.”
By this time, the OSD had enough of the problems and decided to act. For starters, they fired the USAF program management team, and then called the executives of McDonnell Douglas in for a talk. To this day nobody on either side will say exactly what happened, but when the meetings were done, there was a completely new management team running the C-17 program at Douglas. Both sides withdrew their claims against each other, and got to work to solve the problems of the C-17. They also let the Douglas engineers fix the wing!
Now, nothing goes wrong overnight, and neither are engineering and financial problems as bad as those faced by the C-17 team solved quickly. Nevertheless, by early 1993, things were beginning to turn around for the Globemaster, though you would have been hard pressed to know it. A new Democratic Administration had taken over in Washington, and all parties involved knew that the C-17 would come under a new and uncomfortable scrutiny.
The man who drew the duty of deciding life or death for the Globemaster program was John Deutch, the Undersecretary of Defense for Procurement.[47] His decision for the future of the C-17 was anything but easy, though. When he took over the OSD procurement office, there was immense pressure to cut the defense budget so that the money could be applied to other priorities of the Clinton Administration. On the other hand, you did not have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the need for the C-17 was greater than ever. If any event had validated the vision of the original C–X program specification and requirement, the 1991 Persian Gulf War had been it. Desert Storm had used up over half of the C-141 fleet’s remaining fatigue life in less than six months of operations, and airframes were already being flown to the boneyard in Arizona.
There were reasons for optimism about the Globemaster, though, because the new government/contractor management team had taken hold and was getting results that were frankly amazing. By utilizing a concept known as Independent Product Teams (IPTs, “rainbow” groups of military and contractor personnel assigned to accomplish specific sub-tasks of a project), the engineering problems on the C-17 were rapidly being solved. Also, by this time there had been a number of significant milestones and achievements in the program. First flight of the prototype came on September 15th, 1991, and the first production aircraft was delivered to the Air Force on June 14th, 1992. The first paratroop drop, with soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division, had even taken place on July 9th, 1993. The first lot of production aircraft was under contract, and would be delivered whatever Deutch decided. But there also was immense pressure from critics in Congress to kill the program, as well as from competitors like Lockheed and Boeing who wanted to take a crack at the airlifter problem. In the end, Deutch came up with an inspired decision.
He decided to saddle the C-17 program with a production cap of only forty aircraft for a two-year “probationary” period. Only after the two years, and a thorough examination of the aircraft system in actual operations, would a decision be made to purchase additional airframes. Also, to show everyone in the Air Force and at McDonnell Douglas he was serious, he ordered the USAF to initiate the Non-Developmental Airlift Aircraft (NDAA) program, which was designed to procure off-the-shelf heavy transport aircraft in the event that the C-17 did not make the grade. Properly warned, everyone involved in the Globemaster program, from the Pentagon program office to the Long Beach production line to the flight line at Charleston AFB, South Carolina (the first operational C-17 base), sucked it in, knowing that this was their last chance to prove that the new bird was a winner. Amazingly, it was all uphill from that moment on.
Some folks will say that Douglas and the Air Force were lucky. I would tell you that they were ready for the opportunities that came their way in the next few years. However you view the situation, the C-17 team has met or exceeded every challenge that was thrown at them since the new management team took over. Whether it was a no-notice deployment to Rwanda to support relief operations, or disaster relief after a hurricane, the new bird came through and delivered the loads with flying colors, doing things that other airlifters would not even have tried. Amazingly, though, it was the hauling of a single person for a twenty-minute flight that sealed the future for the C- 17. That person was President William Jefferson Clinton, and the ride was to the short, bumpy airfield at Tuzula in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The President had wanted to visit the troops of Task Force Eagle (the American peacekeeping force) as a show of support for the troops and for his policy in the region. Now, you do not fly a jumbo jet (like the President’s VC-25A) painted up like a billboard into such a place as Tuzula without drawing unwanted attention. So another way had to be found to get the Chief Executive, his entourage, and all the media personnel into Tuzula. In the end, the only transport with the necessary short-field and all-weather performance, as well as the necessary defensive countermeasures against SAMs and radar-directed AAA fire, was — you guessed it — the Globemaster. So, when
