St. Louis Show (cont'd)

The St. Louis Air Show which ended last week, gave the aviation industry no great exhilaration. Manufacturers went there hoping to get ideas on marketing planes--their great problem of 1930. Even last year production was much greater than demand, for two major reasons: 1) Manufacturers with plentiful money derived from sale of stocks had optimistically expanded their production facilities; 2) The public, over excited by 1927 and 1928 air exploits, was hedging on purchases, was beginning to buy chiefly for utilitarian needs. This hedging, aviation analysts find, is getting worse this year. However, factories are not expanding any more. Their owners are warily and in many cases fearfully watching the market.

The two most lauded marketing suggestions spread at St. Louis last week:

Analyzing the profitable uses of planes, determining what businesses and individuals could make such profitable uses of them, and intensively canvassing the prospects.

Reducing prices, and thereby attracting dollar-pinched customers. Errett Lobban ("E. L.") Cord inaugurated an intelligent way of doing that. His Cord Corp. controls Lycoming Manufacturing Co. and Stinson Aircraft Corp., which uses Lycoming motors. Heretofore Stinson has paid Lycoming its regular price for motors. Mr. Cord ordered Lycoming to sell Stinson motors at absolute factory cost, a thing Lycoming can well afford because its aviation motor business is a small part of its whole. Stinson thus can charge so much less for its finished planes. This it did during last week. For competitive reasons others, notably Command-Aire and Great Lakes, also cut prices. But most firms jigged stubbornly between high production costs and low demands. Altogether, contracts for only $3,000,000 worth of planes were written up at the show.

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