Busy Bendix

Of all U.S. companies few are busier with critical war work than Bendix Aviation Corp., suppliers of nearly 150 high-precision parts for every big Army bomber. Last week Bendix officials faced an other big time-consuming job: to answer a civil suit filed by Thurman Arnold's Anti-Trust Division in the New Jersey courts, charging conspiracy to choke competition and peg prices in aircraft accessories.

Promptly Bendix emitted a howl of protest which could be boiled down to five words: we are too damned busy. Just this year the company got through with one ten-month investigation by the Attorney General's office which consumed 1,100 days of Bendix officials' time, involved 25,000 pages of documents from their files, ended in a Federal grand jury's returning no indictment. With a civil suit threatened, the company negotiated for a consent decree, seemed on the point of getting one when, it claims, Arnold made a further stipulation: Bendix must give licenses on all of its patents to anyone wanting them--with the Department of Justice acting as arbiter as to royalties.

Though Bendix is now freely giving licenses to all comers for the duration of the war, it points out that it is a different matter to promise to grant them for all time. Moreover the suit seems academic for the present because none of the com pany's foreign agreements in which the Justice Department is most interested are operative as long as the war lasts. Finally, burden of defending the suit will probably fall hardest on the busiest man in Bendix, Charles Marcus, vire president in charge of engineering, who only recently returned from England armed with new ideas for improving the company's equipment. According to the company: "These must all be neglected while Mr. Marcus defends himself and the company for the second time in an anti-trust proceeding now brought in a court of equity concerning contracts no longer in effect."

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