Flight of the Friendship

With a whine of turboprop engines, a fat new airliner quickly gathered speed at Hagerstown, Md. one day last week and took off on its maiden flight. The plane was Fairchild Engine & Airplane Corp.'s F-27 Friendship, the company's jet-age answer to the problem of replacing the hundreds of aging DC-35 still hauling passengers and cargo on U.S. airways. At $590,000, Fairchild's new aircraft will carry almost twice the load (40 passengers) at half again the speed (more than 280 m.p.h.) twice the distance (1,700 miles), and accomplish the task in pressurized, air-conditioned comfort. Says Fairchild President Richard S. Boutelle: "Every DC-3 in the air is fair game for us, and we want to replace them all."

The $25 Million Gamble. Fairchild risked $25 million to develop the plane, needs 200 orders to break even on its rising costs. Last week President Boutelle was almost halfway home, with 95 orders from 14 small feeder lines. The first production model is scheduled to be delivered to West Coast Airlines (which has ordered six) in June, to be hauling passengers by early September, thus beating Lockheed's bigger Electra as the first U.S.-built turboprop in scheduled operation. By year's end Fairchild hopes to have at least 40 planes, built under license from The Netherlands' Fokker, in the air.

For the armed forces, Fairchild has an even hotter project, a new missile so secret that "birdwatchers" at Florida's Cape Canaveral know it largely by rumor. Called the Bull Goose, Fairchild's missile is a speedy, jet-engined vehicle with 5,000-mile range and a mission as unique as its name. Made of fiber glass, the Goose can be fitted with radar reflectors to make it resemble almost any craft including a B-52 Stratofortress or a B58 Hustler, thus decoy enemy defense away from the real bombers. The Goose will have a lightweight, 2,000-lb.-thrust J83 engine, also a Fairchild development. Fortnight ago the J83 passed its Air Force qualification test, and now the Goose is ready for a production contract that the Air Force will only say will amount to "many millions." Nor is the Goose the only fowl in Fairchild's nest.

Fairchild is developing two other fiberglass missiles, the Gander, designed to carry a nuclear warhead, and the Osprey, which acts as a tactical reconnaissance missile and could be fitted with TV or infra-red cameras. Fairchild is also developing a new steel, aluminum and foam-plastic Armalite rifle that weighs only 6.85 lbs. (v. 9.5 lbs. for the old Garand) and serves as everything from a long-distance sniper rifle to a triple-mounted machine gun. The Air Force has designated a version of the rifle as its survival weapon, and it is being tested as a possible NATO weapon.

Trains & Trainers. The Fairchild parent company was known through the 19205 and 19305 as a camera-and-plane maker. Fairchild Engine & Airplane Corp. split off from the parent in 1936, started to diversify soon after World War II, when Dick Boutelle took over the presidency. A onetime Army Air Corps major who went to Fairchild in 1941, Boutelle decided that plane contracts alone were not enough to see the company through the postwar readjustment. Operating out of a trophy-filled office resembling the living room of a big-game hunter, which he is, Dick Boutelle's first move was to stalk any idea that promised a profit. He toyed with a lightweight train, a gasoline-filled glider as an aerial tanker, even a mechanically operated wild-turkey caller. "We'd even make corsets if we saw a profit," said Boutelle.

As it turned out, Fairchild made no turkey callers--or corsets. Hopping into missiles, Fairchild soon found itself expanding its engine as well as its airframe business. The J83 engine soon proved so promising for light jet aircraft that General Dynamics' Canadian subsidiary, Canadair Ltd., chose it as the power plant for the prototype of its new CL-41 trainer, and Lockheed will also use it for its Jet-Star executive transport. Fairchild added half a dozen other lines, from electronic guidance systems for missiles to an aluminum bridge much like a plane wing, in hopes of winning a slice of the highway-building program. While the Government puts up most of the money to build a new bridge, the trouble is that the states are responsible for bearing the cost of all maintenance. Aluminum does not need painting or scraping, so it answers much of the cost problem.

By hitting on the right answers often enough, Boutelle boosted sales from $30.5 million in 1948 to $158.6 million last year, now has a $170 million backlog. Profits jumped from $1,211,563 in 1948 to $4,270,650 in 1955, then slipped to $1,951,484 in 1956, $503,331 last year because of a heavy write-off on the F27. Going into 1958, Fairchild is still writing off on the F27, and will probably show a net loss for the first six months. But the company expects military and civilian orders to increase so fast during the latter half of the year that it will be able to show a new profit for 1958 as a whole. Once the writeoffs are finished, Fairchild hopes to race ahead rapidly in the profit column.

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