Out of the Jet Stream

Trimmed in chocolate brown and canary yellow, the stubby jetliner with the peculiar T-shaped tail lifted off the runway at the Boeing Co.'s Renton plant near Seattle on its successful maiden flight. The plane is the Trijet medium-range 727, roughly three-quarters as large as Boeing's 707 and powered by three fanjet engines mounted in the rear. It is also the only commercial jetliner now under development in the U.S.--and it may be the last. While U.S. airframe companies are all but giving up planemaking, European planemakers are pushing ahead with bold new models that threaten to unseat the U.S. from its traditional position as the world leader in commercial planemaking.

Aside from Boeing, the only U.S. planemaker with a new airliner even faintly on the horizon is Douglas, which would like to build a shortrange, twin-jet DC-9. Douglas has not yet broken even on its long-range DC-8 jet, so far has not a single order for the DC-9, and is not at all sure that it will be able to go ahead with the plane. Two local-service U.S. airlines to which Douglas had hoped to sell DC-9s recently decided instead to buy British Aircraft Corp.'s new One-Eleven, the only short-haul jetliner now in production in the free world.

Dangerous Dependence. Financial turbulence has been too much for the other big U.S. planemakers. Within the past 18 months, Lockheed, after taking an $80 million loss on its turboprop Electra, gave up commercial planemaking entirely; General Dynamics, which lost $425 million on its Convair jetliners, also quit. By withdrawing from commercial planemaking and concentrating on missiles and aerospace, the airframe companies have become increasingly dependent on the Government, which accounts for 83% of Lockheed's sales and 77% of Douglas'. Despite the dangers of such heavy reliance--as Douglas recently discovered when it lost its $1,000,000,000 Skybolt contract--the planemakers clearly prefer dependence on Washington to again risking financial ruin with commercial jets.

European, and especially British, companies have had their troubles, too, but are still pushing ahead with commercial planemaking. They have the advantage over U.S. firms of smaller overhead, lower wages and heavy government subsidies for strictly commercial planemaking. The French Caravelle and to a lesser degree the British Comet and Viscount and the Dutch F-27 Friendship have made some inroads into what used to be almost an exclusively American market. There may be more important inroads soon. Pan American is quietly negotiating with Britain's Hawker Siddeley to buy at least 40 DH-125 jets, which it intends to man with its pilots and lease to corporations. Originally, Pan Am intended to use Lockheed JetStars, but the DH-125, at $550,000, costs only one-third as much.

Last with the Best. The U.S., of course, is still jet king (it has exported $10 billion in planes and parts in the past ten years), and will continue to manufacture its present jet models. But the competition for the next generation of aircraft--the supersonic jet--will be more formidable. No U.S. company is prepared to risk the cost (estimated at upwards of $1 billion) of developing a supersonic jet unless the Government foots a big part of the bill--and so far the Government has shown little inclination to do so. A Soviet supersonic transport is expected within three or four years, and an Anglo-French consortium heavily subsidized by both governments is designing a supersonic liner. By aiming for a less sophisticated Mach 2.2 plane instead of the Mach 3 design favored by U.S. designers, it hopes to have a prototype ready by 1967 at a cost of only $450 million.

Though conceding that the Soviet Union and the Anglo-French will fly supersonic jetliners before the U.S., Federal Aviation Administrator Najeeb Halaby nevertheless contends that "we will be the first to field the best supersonic transport." The trouble is that being last with the best may not be good enough. The U.S. is already far behind. Halaby has appointed a committee to look into Government sponsorship of a supersonic transport; he hopes to present such a plan to President Kennedy by summer. But the Administration's new budget calls for no funds for supersonic transports, and the only Government-sponsored research on supersonic jetliners comes from pitifully inadequate National Aeronautics and Space Administration funds. By the time the U.S. has a supersonic transport ready, the Anglo-French consortium may already have captured a readymade customer: a planned Air Union of the Common Market's five airlines that envisages using standard equipment. Since such big U.S. international flag carriers as Pan American and TWA could hardly let their foreign competitors corner deliveries of the Anglo-French plane, U.S. airlines might find themselves having to order their supersonics from abroad.

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