Final Warning

Ever since the Truman Committee swung a critical haymaker at inspection methods at Curtiss-Wright Corp. (TIME, July 26), the U.S. aviation industry has buzzed with one shocking fact, a skyful of fantastic rumors.

The fact: production of military plane engines at the $141,000,000 Lockland, Ohio plant has nose-dived 85% from the peak reached in March, last month was still only one-thirteenth of the projected capacity of the plant.

The rumors: the Truman Committee had sent undercover snoopers into Lockland, and many another U.S. plane plant, had so terrified inspectors by threats of jail for laxity that all U.S. plane production would soon be hard hit by new, almost impossible, perfection levels.

Last week irate members of the Committee privately denied the rumors, declared that no plane plants were bothered by snoopers, and that production was booming in other engine plants. They also moved publicly to illuminate the fact. In Cincinnati they publicly questioned witnesses in an apparent attempt to prove that Wright itself had deliberately tightened up inspections to impossible levels to cut production, discredit the Committee. (Although rigid inspection requirements are set by the armed forces, good practice is to allow certain deviations which speed production, do not affect use of the product.)

The Committee was unable to prove its point. But from the ground which it had so thoroughly plowed once before, the Committee extracted several additional stinkweedy facts. Some of them:

>Army Air Forces procurement chief, Major General Oliver P. Echols testified that Lockland production had plummeted, partly because "the management in the plant persisted in trying to blame the Army for interference with production. A contributory cause definitely has been the attitude of certain people in the plant. . . ."

>Lockland's resident Army inspection chief, Major Frank La Vista, testified that 400 plane motors were turned down in July on the final test run because of faulty parts. He cited another instance in which three engines, packed for shipping, were found by him to be defective. The company then rechecked 89 other engines packed for shipping, found flaws in a number of them.

For all the old, and some of the new facts, Curtiss' dapper president, Guy Warner Vaughan, was hard put to find answers. He admitted to the Committee that he had not been aware of many of the faults which the investigators had spaded up at Lockland, that "we weren't doing a job in some respects." He felt the production slump was caused by the reorganization the plant, was undergoing to eliminate the bad spots.

But nervous, intense Senator Harry Truman was far from satisfied. After the hearing he bluntly warned: "The Lockland plant is one of the most perfectly tooled in the country, but it is also one of the worst managed we have found. There must be improvement of management or the Army will take over."

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