Can Anyone Fx Those Flxibles?

When the Urban Mass Transportation Administration began planning the "bus of the future" in 1970, designers were full of ideas. The new bus would be attractive, roomy, comfortable --and low enough for the handicapped and elderly to board without difficulty. Flxible and General Motors came up with prototypes in 1973. With an eye toward saving fuel, the UMTA sent them back to the drawing board with an offer to pay $3 per bus for each pound they could remove from the vehicle's weight. In 1977 GM devised the RTS ill, a flashy bus with clean lines and an optional 1 wheelchair lift. Grumman, the company that built o the lunar landing module, bought Flxible and produced a low-slung, 26,000-lb., 48-seat bus, com-Splete with a kneeling mechanism for the handicapped and an electric sign that beamed HAVE A GOOD DAY. Grumman's Flxible 870 with its light 350-lb. A-frame undercarriage began rolling off the assembly line in April 1978.

More than 30 cities put in orders, from Hartford to Houston to Honolulu, for a total today of 4,250. But the cities should have been suspicious of the Flxible 870. After all, that missing e happened to stand for elasticity. Atlanta ordered the first Flxibles--134 at about $95,000 each--and defects, from faulty air conditioning to rickety engine mounts, have kept the maintenance department working overtime ever since. But the real shocker came in New York, the city of killer potholes. New York's Flxibles began rolling in time for last summer's Democratic National Convention, and quickly became known--for their darkly tinted, malevolent-looking fronts--as Darth Vader buses. They also won immediate notoriety for breaking down. By December the city had to take all 637 of its new buses out of service because of cracks in the supporting A-frames.

Grumman began dispatching repair crews throughout the country. New York had to lease 150 old buses from Washington. Chicago replaced 205 Flxibles with 100 old school buses. In Houston, where only about 275 of 475 Flxibles work on a given day, route expansion had to be halted. The prognosis is not encouraging. Grumman is repairing the A-frame by welding more than 200 lbs. of steel plates to the undercarriage. In New York last week, the first of the repaired Flxibles cracked again during stress tests. The repair process, once it is perfected, will take 36 hours. Grumman has set aside $7 million for the project.

The whole fiasco is making the Federal Government, which required cities to buy American vehicles to qualify for subsidies, get out of the bus business. Its requirement for wheelchair capabilities, for instance, added to the weight of the new buses and lowered their fuel efficiency. "It was like trying to build a camel by regulation," says a transportation lobbyist. Many cities are renovating GM's 1959-model "new look" bus, long the mainstay of public transportation. Notes a Chicago transit manager: "They're reliable and pretty much all the bugs were out of them." Other cities, including Atlanta, Seattle, Louisville and Los Angeles, are turning to foreign-made buses such as the West German M.A.N. and the Japanese Hino. Grumman, however, is standing by its bus of the future and doubling the original warranty to six years and 300,000 miles. That warranty, says a company spokesman, "will qualify us for the Guinness Book of World Records. "So will the record of breakdowns.

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