Belated Entry

The Administration is about to take another, and possibly decisive, step in the long, long journey toward a U.S. supersonic transport program. A governmental study group has split evenly between partisans of the plane and opponents. This gives the decisive vote to the chairman, Secretary of Transportation John Volpe, who is due by April 1 to forward a recommendation to the President for final decision. Says Volpe: "I don't see how the U.S. can afford not to go ahead with this ship. I don't want to see our country play second fiddle."

With a Soviet SST and the Anglo-French Concorde already being successfully test-flown, what has delayed the American SST? Two years ago, the U.S. made the decision to build an SST. Later, Boeing, the contract winner, encountered major design problems: its radical swing-wing concept was an economic disaster. The engineers went back to their drawing boards and last fall came up with another SST, this time a fixed delta-wing titanium plane capable of cruising at a speed of 1,800 m.p.h. while carrying more than 250 passengers 4,000 miles.

The delay gave opponents of the SST time to rally their forces. They question whether the Government can afford to underwrite 85% of a $2 billion plane at a time when urban needs are so pressing. Lately, some top airline executives, worried about how they are going to pay the bill for--and then fill with passengers--the $5 billion of subsonic jets already on order, have quietly suggested delaying the project. Other objectors argue that the SST will be the noisiest and most nonproductive luxury transport ever built. In reply, General William Maxwell, the FAA's Director of SST Development emphasizes that the SST will never fly at supersonic speeds over populated areas. It will, in fact, be used only on intercontinental routes around the world, especially on transpacific runs, where it is expected to cut the flying time between Los Angeles and Tokyo from the present 13 hours to five.

What is also at stake is the U.S.'s long domination of the global market for commercial aircraft. Seven out of ten of the transports now in operation, piston or jet, are U.S. built, and have earned billions of dollars in foreign exchange. But such dominance will continue only so long as U.S.-built ships are faster and more efficient than anyone else's. U.S. aviation was in this critical condition once before, when Britain's ill-fated Comet series beat U.S. jets to the skies by nine years. After the Comet tragically failed, the U.S. easily caught up with the British planemakers.

The U.S. cannot count on similar disasters overtaking both the Concorde and the Soviet SSTs.* Thus for reasons of prestige, employment, technology and high finance (an estimated $12 billion market over the next eight years), the U.S. still seems likely to build an SST. The Concorde, for which airlines have taken 74 "options," will probably reap the first harvest, because it is scheduled to be in service by 1971. Unless Nixon has an unanticipated change of heart, a fair bet is that the U.S. SST will be airborne by 1976.

-Most Western airlines are unlikely to buy the Soviet SSTs for reasons involving maintenance, operating economics and an unwillingness to rely on Russia for spare parts. Japan Air Lines, however, has signed an agreement with Russia's Aeroflot to share a trans-Siberian Tokyo-Moscow route, on which it will use the Soviet SSTs.

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