Lawmaker backs 19-year aircraft project that has yet to fly

House Armed Services ranking member Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., expressed confidence Tuesday that a hometown military aviation program remains a worthwhile public investment despite its taking considerable heat for barely getting off the ground after 19 years of development and $63 million in federal funding.

At a hearing before the House Science and Technology Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, Hunter said the DP-2 vertical take-off and landing aircraft, under development by the San Diego-based duPont Aerospace Co., may yield technology breakthroughs for military aviation and deserves continued congressional support.

"Anybody can be critical of [vertical and/or short take-off and landing programs] because VSTOL is very hard to achieve," he told fellow lawmakers.

Hunter, whose connections to duPont Aerospace -- a firm unrelated to the Delaware-based E.I. duPont de Nemours and Co. -- were central to an ABC News story on the DP-2 Monday, asserted that, despite the challenges, VSTOL technologies are "extremely valuable" because they allow planes to take off and land quickly -- a life-saving capability in combat zones littered with heavy enemy ground fire.

Hunter, who volunteered to testify Tuesday, acknowledged that the plane's developers "only have a chance of the DP-2 working," but argued that annual congressional add-ons for the plane are necessary to improve aviation technology.

Indeed, Hunter said, Pentagon planners have not yet devised a next-generation concept to the V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft, which the military will soon deploy to Iraq after 25 tumultuous years in development. The DP-2, Hunter said, would far exceed the V-22 in speed, altitude and range.

"The point is the Pentagon doesn't come up with every great idea," Hunter said.

Congress has authorized and appropriated funding for the DP-2 every year for nearly two decades, despite strong opposition to the program within the Defense Department. In 1986, two years before the DP-2 received its first earmark, the Navy concluded that duPont Aerospace's concept should be "dropped as a solution."

In 1990, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is charged with pursuing futuristic technologies, questioned whether development of the DP-2 was a practical endeavor.

"These reviews and others have found the DP-2 aircraft unsafe, technically unsound and unwanted by the U.S. government, by the Defense Department or commercial airline industry," said Science and Technology Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Chairman Brad Miller, D-N.C. Miller added that Congress "appears to have permitted the DP-2 program to become a hobby, not a serious research project."

During the hearing, Miller showed a duPont Aerospace video of a recent test, demonstrating that the DP-2 could get only a few feet into the air before falling back to the ground. Continuing to fund the DP-2 program amounts to "an insult to the aerospace industry at large and to the taxpayers," said John Eney, the former head of the aircraft conceptual design group at the Naval Air Development Center and Naval Air Systems Command.

William Scheuren, a former Navy test pilot and former DARPA DP-2 program manager, noted that the plane could fly someday, but questioned whether the capability would be worth the cost. Tony duPont, president of duPont Aerospace, defended the DP-2, saying it is nearly ready for flight. And several Republican members of the panel likewise backed Hunter's assertions. House Science and Technology ranking member Ralph Hall, R-Texas, called the DP-2 a "high risk, high reward" development.