Bell Helicopter chairman and chief executive John Murphey is in the sort of corporate hotseat many top executives yearn for: command of a major corporation at the precise moment that corporation is in, if not the fight of its life, certainly some very tough times indeed. The past 18 months have seen a slump in already lackluster sales of Bell’s conventional rotorcraft accompanied by a crippling series of setbacks, scandals and revelations regarding the MV-22 Osprey tiltrotor.
Although the Osprey program is a partnership with Boeing Helicopter, Bell has parlayed the lion’s share of capital while also assuming most of the technical risk. A pair of crashes killing 23 marines in late 2000 and early last year prompted allegations of data cooking and wrongdoing within the ranks of the Marine Corps officers and people administering the program. While the stain of this wrongdoing did not extend to Bell’s front door, required engineering changes prompted a thorough and ultimately quite costly reexamination of Bell’s role in the program.
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