A Meeting of Worriers

For all its promise of a three-hour flight between New York and Paris, the supersonic transport seems not to have broken the worry barrier yet. Governments worry about the high cost of developing it, which ranges from $13.5 million per plane for the British-French job to $40 million for a U.S. design that has not yet been settled on. Airframe makers worry about technical problems --from keeping fuel cool to developing new alloys. Among the most worried of all, as it turned out last week, are the world's airlines, which have already ordered 45 Concordes and 91 of the proposed bigger, faster U.S. model.

In Bogota, at the annual meeting of the 93-member International Air Transport Association--which the normally secretive outfit opened to the press for the first time in 20 years--airmen sounded sorry that they had ever heard of the SST. They fretted about sonic booms, expressed reluctance to give up the highly profitable jets that they now operate, and worried about the shattering effect that they fear supersonics will have on their balance sheets. "At $40 million," said Air India's Chairman J.R.D. Tata, "we would be paying five times as much for an aircraft doing only 21 times the work. I cannot see how we can do this."

A trio of SST engineers tried hard to overcome doubts. Though many airmen have feared that the SSTs would be useless for medium-range flights because of the lengthy ascents they require to reach cruising altitudes, the engineers insisted that the planes will be practical down to flights of only 600 miles, will be able to operate productively for ten hours a day v. nine for the present jets. They held out promise that the sonic-boom problem will be solved eventually, possibly by delaying until high altitudes the crossover from subsonic to supersonic speeds. Most of all, they stressed the inevitability of the SST--a telling argument to an audience that included many whose careers date back to the trimotor Ford.

In Bogota, Sir William P. Hildred, 71, who has served as I.A.T.A. director general for 18 years, announced that he will retire after next year. His replacement: Swedish Diplomat Knut Hammarskjoeld, 42, a nephew of the late U.N. Secretary-General. Sir William had a word or two about the SST. "I hope," he said, "that I shall not live to see the damned things."

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