Duncan Hunter: Never Mind What the Navy Says, This Plane is AWESOME

Congress has spent $63 million dollars in an effort spearheaded by Duncan Hunter to build a plane that the Pentagon does not want and does think will work.

As Brian Ross and Rhonda Schwartz of ABCnews write:

Pentagon documents obtained by the Blotter on ABCNews.com show military analysts have consistently rejected the craft since 1986 as technically flawed.

“We quickly reached a conclusion with substantiation that it was not worth pursing at any level for any amount of money,” said John Eney, a retired Navy analyst involved in the initial rejection.

“What they have now has become the laughingstock of the southern California aviation industry,” said Eney, who is slated to testify tomorrow before Miller’s committee. “I’m embarrassed as a taxpayer and as a 35-year veteran of Naval aircraft engineering.”

Even now, Hunter is trying to get $6 million earmarked for the project. And that’s not the only tie Hunter has to this project, as the article continues:

But the rejection by Pentagon experts did not stop Congress from continuing to pour money into the program, under prodding from San Diego-area congressmen, including Duncan Hunter and Christopher Cox, now chairman of the Securities Exchange Commission.

“They’ve been the two most consistent supporters,” said Anthony DuPont, the president of DuPont Aerospace, the company which designed the craft. DuPont is also scheduled to testify at tomorrow’s hearing.

DuPont said Cox, after college, “actually worked on the airplane as an engineer.”

Both Cox and Hunter have received substantial campaign contributions from DuPont and others at his company, not connected with the giant chemical company of the same name.

You can also see video of the plane crashing/failing to take off here. The House Science Committee report is here.

Hunter for his part is quoted as saying that: “And I think it’s worth it to every marine in Afghanistan and every Marine in Iraq, to try to do the very best we can to develop good technology.” He even brags about spending $8 million on it on his website.

Yet the report by the House Science Committee paints a very different picture:

The U.S. Navy received an unsolicited proposal from Tony duPont for the DP-2 in 1986. But the Navy found a litany of technical problems with the aircraft and recommended that the “DuPont DP-2 concept be dropped.” In 1990, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) conducted a second technical assessment of the DP-2 and concluded: “It is DARPA’S assessment that the design cannot be adapted from its commercial aircraft application to the military requirement. … Additionally, concern over the practicality of the basic DP-2 aircraft was expressed by the technical experts consulted by DARPA,” the report declared. In 1999, the Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) conducted a technical oversight trip to the duPont Aerospace facility in San Diego. The oversight team, which included one dozen aerospace experts, discovered a disturbing series of problems in how the DP-2 aircraft was being manufactured. The team’s reports detailed problems in the fabrication and assembly of the aircraft, quality control processes and procedures, materials development and safety procedures, among other things. The oversight team found, for instance, that no ejection seats had been planned or installed for the DP-2, even though it was being developed as a military aircraft. The review concluded that “The integrity of the [aircraft] to conduct safe hover or forward flight operations is questionable.” In the end, the team said the aircraft’s technical faults would “produce an extremely unsafe vehicle, not worthy of flight.”

At the end of the day, this instance could probably be repeated with most of the members of Congress; to pick on one randomly, I’d imagine that Dennis Kucinich has tried to push a program on a department that it did not want. That’s not really the issue. The issue is Hunter’s close ties to the lobbyists and the continued demonstrations of how poorly conceived the aircraft is. I would think that the overwhelming majority of Americans think innovation to protect the troops is a good idea; but it seems that wasted dollars on something the Pentagon does not want and does not work is something else entirely. Add in the close ties between Hunter and DuPont, and sudden;y this becomes something that could be used on the campaign.

That said, it probably will not be. There’s no real reason for the frontrunners to attack someone lower in the polls on an issue like this. This is the type of issue (earmarking, connection to donors, wasted taxpayer money) that would get a lot more light and attention if Hunter were a front runner, but that seems to be an unlikely outcome right now.

[Also, thanks to the Danger Room Blog for the tip]

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