Frustration Beneath Elation

"It is my judgment that this Government should immediately commence a new program in partnership with private industry to develop at the earliest practical date the prototype of a commercially successful supersonic transport superior to that being built in any other country in the world."

--President Kennedy, June 5, 1963

Among those who cheered Kennedy's decision to build the world's biggest and best supersonic transport was Vice President Lyndon Johnson. But as President, Johnson's enthusiasm has noticeably waned. He properly played a passive part in the bitter 30-month competition between Boeing and Lockheed to build the airframe and between General Electric and Pratt & Whitney to make the engines. But in finally declaring Boeing and G.E. to be the winners, the President also withheld for an indefinite period the money they will need to move full speed ahead in building prototypes of the newly named B-2707.

Thus, beneath their elation, Boeing's brass could only feel a certain sense of continuing frustration. The B-2707, of course, will be by far the most costly airplane ever built. It will fly faster (1,800 m.p.h.), higher (75,000 ft.) and farther (4,000 miles) than any commercial airplane in history. To overcome temperatures of 500 degrees at the speed and altitude in which it will operate, it will be covered with titanium and stainless steel six times tougher than aluminum. For the 250 to 350 passengers aboard, it will be a winged arrow, cutting the flying time from New York to Paris, for instance, to two hours and 20 minutes. A B-2707 traveling from Los Angeles to Denver will have to be cleared to land at Denver before it ever takes off from Los Angeles.

Staggering Finances. Building such an airplane in the numbers required --114 are already on order and estimates are that by 1980 at least 400 will be bought at a total price of $14 billion--is a staggering financial undertaking. About $5 billion will have to be pumped in before the SSTs fly any scheduled flights--and neither Boeing nor Lockheed nor any other private company has that kind of cash lying around. The alternative is that the Government, which paid 75% of the development costs and guaranteed the losers that most of their own investment would be returned, will probably have to put up about 90% of the money.

Present appropriations of about $208 million will enable Boeing and G.E. to proceed for several months of necessary pre-tooling, plant preparation and design refinement. Beyond that, the U.S. supersonic, which is already three years behind the British-French Concorde, will be seriously delayed if funds are not forthcoming. "It is highly important," says Boeing President William M. Allen, "that we move forward as rapidly as is consistent with the production of a sound, viable airplane."

Allen, who has moved Boeing into the leading place among U.S. planemakers during his 21 years as president, will have to do his biggest selling job on Lyndon Johnson, who displayed his ambivalence about the SST in his handling of the announcement of the design winners. Washington had been awash with rumors that the announcement was imminent and that Boeing had won, but Acting Press Secretary Robert Fleming, with the President in Austin, declared that he was "confident" that no announcement was about to be made.

The next morning, at a televised press conference, President Johnson was asked about an SST decision. "We don't have any definite date," snapped Johnson. "General McKee will have an announcement in connection with it shortly." As it happened, "shortly" turned out to be "now" because officials concerned forgot about the one-hour time difference between Washington and Texas. At the same moment, Federal Aviation Agency Administrator William F. McKee in the capital was telling another press conference about the Boeing-General Electric decision.

One reason for Johnson's foot-dragging about the SST is political: he is having trouble with liberal Democratic Senators who fear that the nation's antipoverty program will suffer cutbacks in favor of any spending for the B-2707. Seeking a $200 million supplemental appropriation for SST design work last August, the White House anticipated routine approval. Instead, Wisconsin's William Proxmire led an attack on the project, damned it as "a jet-set frill," finally wound up on the short end of a vote more narrow than anyone expected. Voting with Proxmire, among others, were both Robert and Teddy Kennedy--despite the fact that their brother had been the one who put the U.S. into the SST race in the first place.

If the President and Congress maintain this mood, the ceiling may be lowered for a U.S. industry that has built 78% of the 9,000 airline planes now flying worldwide and is confidently expected to nail down the supersonic market as well after 1974. SST work elsewhere is rolling along. The Russians are hard and quietly at work on the TU-144. In Toulouse last week, the Concorde prototype's wings were mated to its body and the $3 billion project is keeping right on schedule toward scheduled flight in 1971. The Concorde is smaller, slower and less rangy than the B-2707, will seat only 136 people. But it costs only $16 million, or less than half as much, and the Anglo-French consortium, with 69 orders already in the book, anticipates more if work is held up on the American version.

Glory & Jobs. The aircraft industry still remains more than hopeful that the President will eventually provide the necessary money. The industry points to several practical values in speeding up SST work. One is that eventual foreign sales of $40 billion would help the balance of payments. Another is that the Government would recoup everything it laid out in the shape of royalties. Beyond that, the SST, as the biggest single venture ever undertaken by U.S. industry, will create at least 100,000 new jobs across the country. The plane is too big for Boeing to build alone; Avco Corp., Fairchild Hiller, Ling-Temco-Vought, Martin Marietta, North American Aviation and Northrop have already been designated as subcontractors, and Lockheed too may end up with a slice of the work.

Meanwhile, Boeing is going ahead as best it can. The B-2707 still has some design problems; foremost among them is the sonic booms it will create whizzing along at Mach 2.7 and the airport noise its engines will cause. But Boeing is confident that its swing wing, which folds back along the fuselage at 1,800 m.p.h. and opens out at slower subsonic speeds, may solve much of the boom and vvrrooom. And even while some engineers work at refinements such as these, others are already seriously at work on a new generation of jets to eventually follow. They would be called HSTs, for hypersonic transport, and would hurtle along at Mach 10 or 6,600 m.p.h. At that speed, the trip to Paris will take only 45 minutes.

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