"No End in Sight"
(See Cover) One of the American heroes of the Viet Nam war is not a man but a machine--a snub-nosed, whale-tailed airplane that looks as if it would be lucky to get off the ground. Officially designated the C-130 Hercules, it is known as the "Herky Bird" to thousands of U.S. servicemen in Viet Nam, and it provides them with the sustenance of life. The cargo-carrying Herky Bird works when monsoon rains keep supply ships offshore. It flies ammunition and chow to artillery units isolated by the Viet Cong, now moves 65% of the military air cargo inside road-shy South Viet Nam. Wrote Marine Captain George A. Baker III to his cousin in Georgia: "The Hercules is somewhat our guardian angel."
It is also somewhat of a triumph for the Lockheed Aircraft Corp., which produces it, and its performance is precisely what the Pentagon has come to expect of the company. For an unprecedented four years in a row, the company has been the Defense Department's biggest single contractor. The $1.7 billion worth of new defense orders that Lockheed landed in the fiscal year ending last June 30 represented 7.1% of all contracts let by the Pentagon, nearly double the share of its nearest rival, General Dynamics. In the current year, Lockheed is certain to stay at the top of the list of suppliers, having already won two major prizes: a $1.3 billion Air Force contract to build the giant C-5A transport, the world's largest plane, and a development award likely to grow to another $1 billion for the Army's so-called Advanced Aerial Fire Support System, a combat plane combining a helicopter's lift with half the speed of a jet airliner. Aerospace has long since supplanted munitions and ordnance makers as the Pentagon's principal arsenal of war materiel. In that endeavor, no other company seems able to match Lockheed's agility and scope.
Era of Innovation. Much of the credit for Lockheed's success belongs to Chairman Courtlandt Sherrington Gross, 61, who smoothly synchronizes the work of a huge team of expert and highly individualistic executives. At the Pentagon, Robert McNamara's computer-minded whiz kids and crusty admirals alike describe Lockheed's management as brilliant. Lockheed also wins more than its share of the big contracts because of its chairman's gift for soft salesmanship. That gift was developed during the 29 years that Gross played second fiddle at Lockheed to his older brother, the late Robert E. Gross, a fast-driving, fast-spending, fast-thinking airplane maker who could have been played by Clark Gable. Bob Gross was a giant of his times, but times change fast in aerospace. And in the four years since Courtlandt Gross succeeded his brother as chairman, Lockheed sales have risen by 22%, to $1.75 billion in 1965, and its profits have almost doubled, to an estimated $52 million.
The aerospace industry as a whole last year saw sales jump to a record $20.9 billion, with its backlog of orders hitting an $18.6 billion peak. This was the same industry that, after its post-Sputnik missile and satellite surge, felt its fortunes sag. As recently as 1964, the management consultant firm of Arthur D. Little, Inc., declared flatly: "Aerospace is no longer a growing market." Today the Little expert who presided over that report readily admits: "The Viet Cong made a liar out of me." This is true--for the moment. Without question, the U.S. military buildup in Viet Nam gave new life to the aero space companies. But the industry, having learned its lesson the hard way in hard times, has also entered a new era of diversification and innovation, of producing and planning for peace.
The Sporty Course. The industry now sells more than 40% of its hardware and sophisticated technology for peaceful pursuits. These range from helping in the attempt to put men on the moon to mining the riches of the sea, from operating Job Corps training centers to searching for membranes and motive power that would keep an artificial heart beating 20 years inside the human breast. The aerospace business is even bringing its massive brainpower--nearly half of the scientists and engineers employed by U.S. private industry--to bear in devising new ways to fight crime, reduce air pollution or control government red tape.
Aerospace employs more men and women (1,180,000) than any other manufacturing industry in the U.S. (runner up: textiles, with 934,000). Newspaper help-wanted columns bulge with ads for optical thermodynamicists, cryogenicists and avionics-systems experts.
The industry's 50,000 suppliers reach into almost every community in the nation; yet its prime plants are so concentrated in a few states and cities that aerospace fortunes can make or break the economies of those centers. General Dynamics and Bell Helicopter provide a third of the manufacturing jobs in Fort Worth. Boeing now plans to up its Seattle work force from 64,000 to 80,000, and there are delighted complaints about how this will put a real strain on the area's housing and school facilities. Lockheed is chiefly based in California, but its huge Georgia plant at Marietta, the size of 93 football fields, is so important to the state that Senator Richard Russell, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, felt that it would help his political future if Lockheed won the contract for the C-5A transport; after a visit to the White House, Russell exultantly leaked the news two days before it was supposed to become official. Lockheed's 22,000 Marietta employees celebrated with a spree of buying autos, appliances, houses and summer cottages.
As for California, which holds 22% of prime military and 41% of prime NASA contracts, aerospace is indispensable. With 33% of the state's 1,500,000 manufacturing employees on aerospace payrolls, California owes to the industry the fact that it is now the nation's most populous state. According to a Bank of America estimate, aerospace jobs have drawn at least 1,670,000 people to California in a decade.
Yet for all its impact, aerospace profits remain low: 3.1% of sales against 5.5% for all U.S. manufacturers. One reason: in a little-noted change of vast consequence, cost-conscious Robert McNamara has switched Pentagon buying away from lax, cost-plus contracts toward fixed-price, incentive awards. Increasingly, defense contractors must sharpen both their engineering and their bids to win business. Efficient operators who trim costs or beat delivery schedules are rewarded with higher profits; fumblers are being winnowed out. Says Northrop Chairman Tom Jones: "It's a sporty course to run."
Beyond Shoes & Wax. In running that course, the industry is constantly aware of a paradox: aerospace products and systems may take many years to develop, but they can become obsolescent almost overnight. Lockheed, which employs 81,302 people, estimates that it must generate an average of $7,500,000 worth of new business every working day just to stay even. Says Courtlandt Gross: "This is quite a hungry mouth to feed, and it gives me plenty of anxiety." Lockheed President Daniel Jeremiah Haughton echoes his chairman: "Every morning this is a problem that gets up with me. I start reflecting on it by the time I've had a cup of coffee. And then I start wondering what our competitors are up to. I know that somewhere they're already at work doing something that's going to make it rough for us."
Lockheed's inevitable answer is diversification. The company makes neither shoes nor sealing wax, but its 43 plants do build ships, satellites, research submarines and even a 220-ft. hydrofoil vessel. Lockheed maintains President Johnson's Boeing-built 707 jet. Its 300 products range from metal micro-particles .025 in. in diameter--as small as sifted sand--to the Polaris missiles, capable of bearing hydrogen warheads from beneath the sea to targets 2,500 miles away. Lockheed's second-stage Agena rocket has put more payload in orbit than any other U.S. booster, telemetered more data from space than all other U S. spacecraft combined.
Like almost all other aerospace companies, Lockheed is expending money and energy on projects that have little to do with air, much less space. Company engineers devised a computerized system for the Alameda-Contra Costa Counties (Calif.) Blood Bank that cut inventory losses in half in two months by keeping track of supplies; using that system, every blood bank in the U.S. could theoretically run from the same computer. Lockheed last year concocted plans for a statewide information-retrieval system that would theoretically enable California to keep a Big Brother-like watch on its citizens; with the help of computerized data-storage units in various localities, officials in Sacramento could press a button to check up on local tax collections, highway repairs, personnel needs--eventually perhaps even alimony payments or political contributions. It may seem odd to laymen that space technology can be applied to such earthbound matters, but "systems management," the mastery of computerized complexity, remains the same in principle, whatever the problem to be solved.
Lockheed's rare-earth research has uncovered a cathode-sensitive red phosphor that interests makers of color television tubes. One Lockheed division is constructing a $10.5 million dam across Colorado's Fryingpan Creek, another across Oregon's Blue River and is completing a half-mile freeway through the heart of downtown Seattle. Another division builds nuclear reactors in Georgia, has developed an irradiated wood that is much tougher than the hardest hardwood.
Despite all this earthbound branching out, aircraft, almost all of them military, still account for more than half of Lockheed's revenues. Twelve nations now fly Herky Birds. Hercules' successor, the C-141 jet StarLifter, has carried more than half of the 60,000 servicemen flown to Viet Nam since the U.S. buildup began last summer. Lockheed's F-104 fighter has become the NATO standard. Built in six foreign countries and flown by seven more, the F-104 "missile with a man in it" has contributed $800 million to aerospace exports. These have become one of the largest items ($1.4 billion last year) in the U.S. trade surplus, which underpins the value of the dollar.
Last month Lockheed delivered to the Strategic Air Command the first operational SR-71, the world's fastest (2,070 m.p.h.) jet and successor to the famed U2. Flying at three times the speed of sound, the titanium-skinned reconnaissance craft can, from an altitude of 80,000 ft., spy on 60,000 sq. mi. of the earth's surface an hour; with modifications, it can act as the hottest of all combat interceptors.
As for its elephantine C-5A cargo plane--four times the size of today's ungainly Herky Birds, with a tail seven stories high--Lockheed hopes that it will start an upheaval in military strategy, commercial travel and even ocean shipping. One-third faster (550 m.p.h.) than Russia's AN-22, which awed Europe last spring, the C-5A will carry-twice the payload: 50 autos, or six Greyhound buses, or 14 supersonic jet fighters, or 700 combat-ready troops or the largest piece of equipment the Army uses, a 74-ton portable bridge. By 1972, fleets of C-5A's will enable the Pentagon to airlift entire armies with full battle gear anywhere in the world in a few days. Overseas military bases might then be reduced to token strength, since the Army could fight at least small wars abroad without hauling anything by ship except bulk supplies, such as coal or oil. In a civilian version, which Lockheed hopes to have on the market by 1970, the C-5A could carry up to 1,000 passengers, allowing airlines not only to slice the New York-London fare to $75 but to carry air freight cheaply enough (less than 3-c- per ton per mile) to take substantial traffic from railroads and ocean shipping.
The Team. This arsenal of technical prowess is commanded by a slender wisp of a man (5 ft. 7 in., 148 Ibs.) with thinning grey hair, twinkling blue eyes, a Boston accent, and an almost embarrassing diffidence. Among strangers, Lockheed Chairman Gross will go far out of his way to avoid admitting that he heads one of the nation's largest industrial corporations. To occupational questions from fellow airline travelers, he usually responds: "I'm in manufacturing." Recently a famous European actress seated beside him at a Hollywood dinner party asked the inevitable "What do you do?" Replied Gross: "I'm an aircraft mechanic." To his relief, the actress ignored him for the rest of the evening.
At leisure, Gross enjoys the quietude of his $300,000, six-acre estate high in the Santa Monica Mountains, where his wife, the former Mrs. Alix Van Rensselaer Devereux Wanamaker, often joins him at his hobby, gardening. At work amid the thunder of aircraft at Lockheed Air Terminal, Gross operates out of a resolutely old-shoe office, with bare green walls, a few wooden and leather-covered chairs reminiscent of his Harvard undergraduate days, and a rolltop desk. One visible vanity: a different pair of Ben Franklin spectacles with frames to match each day's fastidious London suit and breast-pocket handkerchief.
Gross gets paid $127,164 a year, and his 57,669 shares of Lockheed stock (worth $3,450,000) earned him another $115,338 in dividends last year. In return, he runs an orderly administration in which, says Lockheed Director William A. M. Burden, onetime Assistant Commerce Secretary for Air, "He does not impose details, as other large aerospace companies do, but gives scope to other people."
Those "other people" emphatically include Dan Haughton, 54, Lockheed's president since 1961. He and Gross behave, says Burden, "as if they were running a small partnership." Haughton, an Alabama coal miner's son, put himself through the University of Alabama by moonlighting in the mines, graduated ('33) as an accountant, and joined Lockheed in 1939. A prodigious worker who arises at 4 o'clock every morning, rarely gets to bed before midnight, he spends at least half of his time jetting about through Lockheed's 34-state corporate domain.
While he is away from Burbank, the man who tends the headquarters shop is Executive Vice President A. Carl Kotchian, 51, a onetime Price Waterhouse accountant who is virtually Haughton's alter ego. And then there is Lockheed's biggest intangible asset, Vice President (for Advanced Projects) Clarence L. ("Kelly") Johnson, a $114,507-a-year (including bonuses) design genius who bosses the Burbank "skunk works," where Lockheed keeps its surprises a secret. Broadnosed, with piercing blue eyes and a bubbling humor, Johnson resembles a sober W. C. Fields. He decided to become a plane builder at twelve, joined Lockheed as soon as he won a master's in aeronautics from the University of Michigan. His drawing-board magic has created 19 of Lockheed's famed planes. Among them: the Hudson bomber, P-38, P-80, Constellations, F-104, U2, and SR-71.
Ex-accountants Haughton and Kotchian keep a close watch on costs, and Gross is more than content to leave Lockheed's day-to-day operations to them and the company's 46 vice presidents and the presidents of nine quasiautonomous subsidiaries. But there is no question that Courtlandt Gross has the final say on major policy decisions. In a notoriously nervous industry, where a decision made in panic can cost many millions, Gross is known for his imperturbability. Recalls Haughton: "The first time I ever saw him he was in a swivel chair, talking on the phone. Then I heard a commotion, and I saw that he had reared back too far. He was flat on his back on the floor--still talking. I don't think he missed a beat."
In describing his functions, Gross characteristically makes light of his special talents and compares himself unfavorably with his late brother. Says he: "Robert had an instinct for the creative side of the business which I haven't got. I rely entirely on others."
Done with Teddy Bears. Sons of a well-to-do coal-mine manager, the Gross brothers grew up in the Boston suburb of West Newton, where acquaintances still remember that a chauffeur-driven Pierce-Arrow bore the family to the Second Congregational Church every Sunday. Even in their youth, Bob, eight years the older, was an icebreaker; Court happily tagged along. He followed his brother to boarding school, then to fashionable St. George's School near Newport, where his four-year academic average of 91.75 remains a record. Says Classmate James Hutchinson, now a Boston bond broker, recalling the serious-minded boy: "Courty put his teddy bears away a little before the rest of us."
After graduating from Harvard ('27) with a major in English literature, Court trailed Bob, by now a rising junior executive, to the Boston investment-banking house of Lee, Higginson & Co. After the 1929 crash, he again followed his brother--this time into their first venture in aviation, New Haven's Viking Flying Boat Co., which built sport-model seaplanes. But the Depression hardly provided a favorable market for sport planes, and Bob lost heavily. Leaving Court to run the moribund company on his weekends, Bob Gross moved West and, with six associates, bought then bankrupt Lockheed in 1932 for a mere $40,000. Said the judge who permitted the sale: "I hope you know what you're doing." Today Lockheed common stock is worth $710 million, but for a while the judge's skepticism seemed well founded: during its first six months under Bob Gross, Lockheed sold only $23,000 worth of spare parts. While Bob was struggling in California, Court took a small office in Manhattan and, because the company was too poor to pay him a salary, began trying to sell Lockheed planes on commission.
Famous planes they were, even then. Founded in 1916 by two barnstorming brothers, Allan and Malcolm Loughhead (pronounced Lockheed), the company had produced the Winnie Mae, a single-engine Vega in which one-eyed Wiley Post circled the globe, another Vega in which Amelia Earhart set a nonstop cross-country record for women. Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh flew a later Lockheed model, the Sirius, across Bering Strait to Tokyo.
But past exploits were hardly enough to save the company. What did save it was a new plane, whose basic design Bob Gross conceived while lingering over coffee one morning in the lobby of Burbank's Union Air Terminal. The plane was Lockheed's Electra 10, a twin-engine, all-metal, ten-passenger ship with the highest load/gross-weight ratio and the lowest price ($36,000) of any comparable aircraft of its time. The Electra 10 sold solidly to U.S. airlines as well as to carriers in Latin America and eight European countries (Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich in an Electra 10).
The Fork-Tailed Devil. The Electra 10 turned Lockheed into a better-thangoing concern, and World War II converted it into a giant. Its P-38 Lightning, the only U.S. fighter in continuous service throughout World War II, was dubbed by Luftwaffe pilots "der gabel-schwanz Teufel"--"the fork-tailed devil." Making Hudsons for the British before the U.S. entered World War II, Lockheed ran into the U.S. Neutrality Act, which forbade either U.S. or British citizens to ship or fly the planes from the U.S. to Britain. Court Gross helped devise a stratagem. Lockheed bought a wheat farm on the North Dakota-Canada border, flew its bombers there from the Burbank assembly line, hitched them to teams of horses. The horses, supposedly not subject to the laws of man, drew the planes across the boundary. Canadians unhitched the animals, let British pilots ferry the aircraft on to England.
During the war, Court Gross went to Burbank as Lockheed's general manager, showed his executive ability by unscrambling the production tangles sometimes left by his brother's impulsive decisions. At war's end, Lockheed stayed aloft because it was ready not only with the four-engine Constellation, which ran away with the first round of airline orders, but with the U.S.'s first jet fighter, the F80 Shooting Star, which provided the basic design for so many later models that Lockheed engineers nicknamed it "Old Hodgepodge."
For Lockheed, it all looked too good to be true--and it was. Saturn, a 16-passenger feeder transport, and the Constitution, a 168-passenger behemoth, proved to be expensive flops. After a disastrous crash, Washington grounded all Constellations, and order cancellations piled on top of rewiring costs. Though Lockheed eventually lost $35 million on commercial sales of the Connie, the plane returned to the air, set speed records for four-engine piston craft that may never be broken, and airlines still fly 455 Constellations in a day when anything that isn't a jet is considered a creep. Again, in 1959, when Lockheed's Electra turboprops began coming apart in midair, the company's sales of passenger planes crashed with them. Burdened with a $25 million bill for modifying Electras, which have since performed splendidly, and a $31 million loss on its ten-passenger executive JetStar, the company sank $42.9 million into the red in 1960. The next year, Bob Gross died of cancer and his brother moved up from president to chairman.
A Push from Monopsony. By then, Lockheed had decided to retreat, at least temporarily, from the commercial-plane market and stake its future on defense and space work. The move was well timed. The company was already deeply involved with the Navy's Polaris missile, which has accounted for more than $2 billion--a fifth--of the company's revenue over the past decade. Polaris' successor, the Poseidon, will probably bring Lockheed and its subcontractors another $2 billion.
The missile splurge, plus the nation's effort to overtake the Soviet Sputnik in the peaceful exploration of space, demanded airborne equipment bulging with electronic innards. As a result, the traditional airframe industry broadened into today's aerospace industry, in which such non-planemakers as IBM, Bendix and General Electric play critical roles. Soon a new business climate emerged. At the top, the Pentagon made shrewd use of its monopsony--one customer but many suppliers--to foster competition. To meet the unsparing military demand for excellence, companies undertook research and development on a hitherto undreamed of scale; today engineers and scientists constitute a third of Lockheed's work force against only 5% during World War II. Bidding for big contracts became so costly that companies began to specialize instead of lunging after every bit of new business. Often aerospace firms must risk millions of their own dollars on up to eight years of research just to stay in the race to build fewer, but costlier weapons. "We've become more sophisticated, more efficient and more competitive," says Courtlandt Gross. "We've had to --to survive. Our competitors are very alert, very wise, very hard-working." Among Lockheed's top competitors: -- Boeing last year surged to the top of the 1,250 U.S. aerospace companies in sales (an estimated $2.1 billion) and profits (an estimated $77 million), thanks to record orders for its efficient commercial jets. It is an anomaly of the trade that though jets are immensely profitable to the airlines, Boeing alone among the planemakers has so far profited from building jets for commercial use. Boeing has not won a major military contract since 1958, suffered major setbacks by not capturing either the TFX or C-5A award. The company, however, is battling Lockheed for the Government contract to build a supersonic transport; a win would make up for a lot of lost business.
>North American dropped to second in sales ($2.01 billion) and third in profits ($45.8 million, behind both Boeing and Lockheed) in 1965. North American's bread and butter is space--NASA's Apollo moon vehicles, Saturn space boosters, Air Force rocket engines and missile-guidance systems. But its fortunes started skidding in 1964 when the Government canceled development of the XB-70 supersonic bomber, into which the company had plunged $1.4 billion. Now the escalation of the Viet Nam war is bringing cutbacks in NASA spending, and North American is not even in the running for any of the major awards due in 1966.
> Douglas Aircraft, once the blue chip of the planemakers, has in recent years flown in Boeing's jet wash. But by bringing out its short-range DC-9 nearly two years ahead of Boeing's competing 737, Douglas last year managed a major comeback. Last month it rolled out an elongated, 200-passenger version of its DC-8 in a bid for the interim market before the C-5A is ready. By winning the $1.5 billion contract last year to build the Air Force's first manned orbiting laboratory, on which it had gambled $60 million of its own, Douglas jumped into a commanding lead in a big new space program.
> General Dynamics, revitalized after the largest loss ever suffered by a U.S. corporation ($135 million in 1961), last year won a $1.7 billion production contract for its controversial F-111 (born TFX) adjustable-wing Air Force-Navy fighter. The company also garnered development awards to convert it into a spy plane and a bomber to replace the Strategic Air Command's B-52. Though its Convair division in San Diego still limps, G.D. has a near-record backlog of nuclear-submarine orders, is busy producing antiaircraft and ship-to-air missiles.
> McDonnell Aircraft, which bypassed missiles to concentrate on space (Mercury and Gemini capsules), has stepped up production of its dazzling F-4 Phantom fighters for the U.S. Air Force, Navy, and Marines, and the British. It is also developing an infantry antitank rocket and rebuilding an original Gemini capsule for reuse with a new heat shield in the manned-orbiting-laboratory program.
Behind these prime contractors, scores of specialists ranging from Aerojet-General (rocket fuel) to United Aircraft (jet engines) are pursuing prosperity with a diversity of projects. Nine allied countries fly Northrop Corp.'s hot twin-jet F-5 fighter, and the company is developing deep ocean bases for the Navy, building three broadcasting stations in Ethiopia, and teaching budgetary accounting to the Nicaraguan government. Comsat has just placed a $35 million order for 24 satellites with Cleveland-based TRW Inc. Martin Marietta last month won the first production contract, for $12,085,430, for the Walleye glide bomb, a missile that is hauled high by a plane, then unleashed to swoop on an enemy with television guidance.
The whole industry hustles for the $16.3 billion a year of Government aerospace business. Lockheed not only keeps a 22-man Washington team circulating among the Pentagon, NASA, the FAA and Capitol Hill, but deals with 300 separate offices and agencies of Government through 17 sales offices across the U.S. Representatives at every NASA installation and most major military bases teletype weekly reports to Burbank on what hardware these key customers are likely to want next. To sell abroad, Lockheed has created a "foreign service corps" that includes many influential Europeans. The company hired the Duke of Edinburgh's equerry, for instance, to help sell the C-130 Herky Bird to the British, landed orders for 48 planes. Since 1962, Lockheed has taken in nearly $500 million in foreign sales, now earns 25% of its profits abroad.
All aerospace companies are sensitive to the hot and cold winds of international relations. "A Communist leader sneezes in Moscow or Peking," says Lockheed's Executive Vice President Kotchian, "and we feel it here in Burbank." Communist leaders have been sneezing pretty hard lately, and the aerospace industry has been affected accordingly. Thus, of the additional $12.7 billion that President Johnson recently requested to fight the Viet Nam war, $3.1 billion is earmarked to buy 2,000 helicopters and 900 planes (the U.S. last year lost 275 planes and 76 helicopters in the war zone). But the leaders of the airframe-turned-aerospace industry learned long ago that no war lasts forever, and this time they plan to be ready for peace.
Flying Buses. It is to such thoughts of the future that Courtlandt Gross turns today. "The commercial version of the C-5A will be an ocean liner of the air," he says. "And the supersonic transport, at close to 2,000 m.p.h., will carry you east to west, figuratively, faster than the sun." The supersonic transport is also aerospace's next big prize: a potential $20 billion income producer for its maker. For the Government, which may have to advance 85% of, the development cost, the plane seems crucial to keeping the U.S.'s lucrative position as the free world's chief source of aero space equipment.
Lockheed envisages the development of a whole new family of jet-helicopters to serve as tomorrow's interurban buses. After taking off vertically from downtown heliports in cities such as New York, they would fold their rotors in midair, whisk to, say, Boston in 30 minutes, then settle softly in midcity. Such flying buses could evolve from vertical takeoff and landing craft now being built by several firms. Lockheed's three entries: the Army's Advanced Aerial Fire Support copter-jet with rigid rotors that increase stability, the smaller XH-51A winged copter, or even the Army XV-4A Hummingbird, a tiny jet which can jump straight up, hover, or zip forward at 500 m.p.h.
"These planes are all in the near future," promises Gross. For the years beyond, Lockheed has already drawn preliminary plans for a semiballistic transport. "A trip in it," says Gross, "would be something like a trip in a missile." One imaginative designer has suggested that it could be used with a "sleep machine," already technically feasible. Explains Gross: "You arrive at the air terminal, enter a little room, lie down and clamp on a headset. In an instant you are asleep. Then you are stacked into the vehicle, shot to your destination and awakened when you get there." He adds dryly: "If this seems bizarre or even repulsive, consider whether in-flight sleep might not be a fitting accompaniment to in-flight movies."
Lockheed is investigating ocean-mining techniques, moving into metal-corrosion prevention, planning a pilot plant to make metallic powder, helping to engineer a water-desalting plant. It has even suggested how hospitals might save millions in operating costs by better information control. Considering man's challenge from the hostile environments of seas and space and from his intricate problems on earth, Gross maintains: "There is really no end in sight."
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