Cutback Casualties

The U.S. Government last week took an old-fashioned ax to the next generation of U.S. military aircraft in what may well be the start of a new cutback in aircraft and missile programs. The Air Force announced that it was abandoning plans to produce high-energy boron aircraft fuels at Olin Mathieson Corp.'s two-city-block, $45 million plant near Niagara Falls, which was scheduled to deliver its first batch of exotic fuel this month. It also canceled a contract with the General Electric Co. for producing the J-93-5 engine to power North American Aviation's "chemical" B70 bomber with a combination of exotic and conventional fuels. Next day the Navy announced that it was dropping all work in exotic fuels, including the $35 million Gallery Chemical Co. plant at Muskogee, Okla., which was 99% finished. Both plants belong to the Government, will have to be mothballed unless they can be adapted to produce other chemicals.

Range v. Money. The exotic-fuel program was a casualty of Defense Secretary McElroy's drive to cut back all "marginal" defense work in an all-out effort to pare down the 1961 budget. It put an end to present hopes for boron-powered planes that would get 40% more energy out of a pound of fuel, thus increase their range (or speed) without adding weight. The Navy has already spent $122 million in the program, the Air Force another $110 million. The first group of 20 B-70s with boron afterburners would have cost $3.5 billion, and the boron fuel to power them would have been about 100 times more expensive than conventional, petroleum-product fuel.

But what really made exotic fuel a marginal program was the rapid developments in aviation and rocketry since the program began, plus some hard-to-lick bugs in using the fuel. Jet engines have improved so rapidly, even using cheap kerosene as fuel, that they are rapidly, approaching the efficiency expected with exotic fuels. Furthermore, U.S. missiles that can be fired at a distant target from speeding planes have been developed so fast that an increase in the range of the B70 is not as important as it once was.

Air Force v. Navy. The Air Force still sees great promise in high-energy fuels for rockets and ramjet engines, intends to continue working on them at two small pilot plants. But the Navy has decided to abandon its work in the field entirely, convinced that boron fuels do not hold the great promise it expected.

General Electric will go ahead with its J-93-3 engine, which accounts for $90 million of its $100 million contract with the Air Force. The J-93-3 is conventionally fueled, is scheduled to go into both North American's B70 and its F108 fighter. Officials insist that the boron cutback itself does not mean a cutback in the B70 bomber program, but only an alteration in the bomber to make it wholly conventionally fueled, and that the cutback has no relation to the F-108, which was programed to use conventional fuels all along. But many aircraft men feel that both programs, which barely got into the Administration's budget request last year, can hardly avoid cutbacks in the cost-cutting program.

Last week word of another marginal trim came from the Pentagon. In fiscal 1961, the Air Force will reduce its orders for Convair's B-58s ($26.7 million each) from 40 aircraft to 32, reverting to the annual delivery rate planned before the Air Force decided to make 1961 a bumper year for B-58s.

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