"Help!"

It is no trade secret that the big planemakers have been having trouble. But how bad is it? The planemakers last week answered with a single word: "Help!"

Lockheed's Robert E. Gross had thought he had "ample reserves to face the peace." Now they are gone. The Glenn L. Martin Co. laid off 2,000 workers last fortnight, and last week announced it would skip its quarterly dividend. Douglas Aircraft Co., which can usually make money if anyone can, reported a loss of $807,000 in the quarter ending Feb. 28. On the first 20 DC-6 transports delivered, it has lost over $5,000,000. (It hopes to make a profit on them eventually.) Republic Aviation Corp., now building the Army's fastest jet fighter plane, lost $2,134,220 ($536,220 after tax credit) in the first quarter.

The desperate planemakers last week carried their woes to the men they hoped might help them. For two days 60 members of the Aircraft Industries Association and top Army, Navy and State Department officers met in secret session in Williamsburg, Va.

Bad Risks? The Army & Navy were told what they already knew: the 14 major plane companies, which had expanded enough to build 96,000 planes in 1944, had been forced to contract to a production of only 1.330 military planes last year. The industry, which had not been able to cut its overhead accordingly, could not survive without larger orders. Commercial orders have passed their peak and by next year the airlines may have just about all the planes they will need for a long time. The Army & Navy had little to offer but sympathy. Present budget schedules, which will probably be cut, will allow them to order only 1,500 planes next year, half as many as their own Air Coordinating Committee had recommended.

Next day the planemakers trooped to Washington to tell their story to Senator Owen Brewster's aviation subcommittee. Glenn Martin, short of cash, has been able to borrow only $3,000,000 from bankers. He has had to ask RFC for a $25,000,000 loan to keep operating. Martin emphasized that modern planes can't be built on a shoestring basis. Said he: "National defense needs have advanced to a supertechnical stage which makes it impractical and unrealistic, if not impossible, to carry out the Government's past policy of a skeleton peacetime military organization."

Lost Ground. Lockheed's Gross warned that the U.S. is in danger of "being outstripped in technical achievements by Britain [notably in jet planes] and surpassed in numbers by Russia." The only way in which the industry can survive, Gross claims, is to merge the 14 major companies into eight or nine, each concentrating on a single plane type.

There had to be a long-range plan to permit the slow, expensive development of new types. Consolidated Vultee has built one 400-man troop-carrying C-99. But Consolidated's President Harry Woodhead said that without more millions of dollars and years of preparation for production the C-99 might just as well be a "museum piece." Warned J. Carlton Ward Jr., president of Fair child Engine & Airplane Corp.: "We will never again have five years to mobilize aircraft production."

What was needed, said Major General Oliver P. Echols (retired), Aircraft Industries Association president, was modernization of antiquated aviation legislation and a five-year production program which would permit planemakers to plan far enough ahead. Minimum security for the U.S., he said, called for production of 5,780 military planes a year. A minimum of 3,000 to 5,000 was needed to assure the industry's survival. An air policy board was necessary to do the overall planning, make recommendations to Congress. The planemakers had stated their case. The next move was up to Congress.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.