Skinner Misses Cheap Fix To Air Transport Crisis

Yesterday, President Bush and Transportation Secretary Samuel Skinner unveiled with great fanfare a new initiative aimed at resuscitating the Nation’s overburdened and obsolescent transportation infrastructure. This initiative was immediately criticized for its failure to assume an adequate federal responsibility for the costs of, for example, rehabilitating existing airports and building new ones.

The Center for Security Policy believes that an even more serious shortcoming of the Administration’s strategy is that it entirely overlooks a tool for both drastically reducing such airport construction costs and enormously improving the quality of the national air transportation system: the tiltrotor V-22 Osprey. This aircraft, which has been called the most important aviation development since the invention of the jet engine, has the ability to take off and land like a helicopter yet fly horizontally at speeds far in excess of those possible for helicopters.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., director of the Center, observed, "Because the Bush Administration’s defense budget has shortsightedly called for the termination of the V-22, neither the Marine Corps nor the other military services will have available to them a system optimally suited to as many as twenty-five important missions, from combat airlift to drug interdiction to search-and-rescue."

Gaffney added, "As a result, the military will not play the role it traditionally has in facilitating the introduction of such radically innovative technology to the civilian sector. That has two consequences — both bad for the United States:

• "First, we will be unable to take advantage in the near-term of the tiltrotor system’s potential to reduce dramatically otherwise pressing requirements for expensive new airports envisioned in Secretary Skinner’s plan. That means unnecessary costs, wasteful use of land resources, adverse environmental impact and additional burdens on the taxpayer.

 

• "Second, since the value of the tiltrotor technology is well understood by other nations facing similar (or even more critical) transportation problems, there is a high likelihood that the U.S. decision to abandon the preeminent position in this field — which, thanks to the V-22, it currently enjoys — will compel this country to buy from foreign sources the tiltrotor systems we must have in the future."

Gaffney concluded, "Secretary Skinner has made much in his advocacy of the new transportation initiative of creative, new ways to rebuild the Nation’s infrastructure. He should start with one of the most creative and newest ways available — the V-22 Osprey."

The Center urges the Bush Administration and the Congress to reexamine the Defense Department’s decision to foreclose this option and, in so doing, to inflict such clearly avoidable harm on the American transportation system and on the taxpaying citizens who will have to foot this unnecessarily costly bill.

Please contact the Center for more information on this issue — including a copy of its recent publication, The Next FSX Fiasco which exposes the shortsightedness of the U.S. government’s present approach to the V-22 as a key military and civilian technology program.