Red Tape Cutter

One day last week six top aircraft executives of the East--including Guy Vaughan of Curtiss-Wright, Glenn Martin of Martin, Larry Bell of Bell Aircraft--packed their bags and entrained for California. They went West to meet Pacific Coast producers and set up a new National Air craft War Production Council. Aim: to help cut production red tape for the whole airplane industry.

Germ of this solid idea was born a year ago when West Coast aircraft manufacturers, including Donald Douglas, Robert Gross of Lockheed and others, decided to pool the know-how of their companies for the duration, and to exchange scarce parts, scarcer raw materials, even jewel-precious engineering and manpower talents. So successful was their cooperation that East Coast producers soon followed their lead.

Formation of the new national council joining West and East Coast together has had to wait till the right manager could be found. This week the producers thought they had him: greying, 38-year-old Frank F. Russell, who went from Yale ('26) to Wall Street, in 1939 became president of National Aviation Corp., a low-earning, almost static investment trust. His big job since the war has been to act as liaison man and trouble shooter for Bell, Lockheed and half a dozen other concerns of which he is director. His assets: geniality, toughness, a precise, realistic knowledge of almost every factory floor in the industry.

When the California meeting ends, Frank Russell will resign his directorships, open an office in Washington. Already he had been offered more than one Government job. Always before his good friends in the Government--Robert A. Lovett, Assistant Secretary of War for Air, Artemus L. Gates of the Navy, and Ted Wright of WPB--have advised him to stay away from Washington, to keep close to the production line. This time they gave him the green light. His job: to help cut red tape between Government and the aircraft industry as effectively as individual companies have learned to break bottlenecks in their own operations.

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