Hedgehopping

U.S. aircraft builders, who know only too well how long it takes to step up military plane production to capacity, were worried last week. After three weeks of war they had received no new orders, nor any indication from business-as-usual Washington that any new orders were planned.

Yet the U.S. was far worse off in military plane production than it had been at the time of Pearl Harbor, when it had had the benefit of two full years of preparation for war including French and British orders (see chart). By the end of 1941, the U.S. was turning out 19,290 military aircraft a year; in the last twelve months, only 2,713 military planes were delivered. And the scheduled production for the next twelve months is even smaller--a spindly 2,297 planes, in the face of current Soviet production believed to total 12,000 military planes a year.

The blame lay squarely on the penny-pinching of Harry Truman and Defense Secretary Louis Johnson. For more than a year they had ignored the urgings of the Truman-appointed Finletter Committee (TIME, Jan. 19, 1948) that the U.S. assemble a 70-group Air Force, buy some 5,200 planes a year from U.S. manufacturers. Instead, the Administration decided 48 groups would be enough. Last year, when Congress instead voted $2.6 billions for a 58-group Air Force and for Naval aviation, Johnson set aside $851 million of the money to keep the ceiling at 48 groups. But deliveries now scheduled for fiscal 1951 will not even provide the 2,672 planes required for that.

Out of Moth Balls. Luckily the U.S. was not as badly off as it seemed. To date, the planes most needed in Korea are not the fastest, latest jets on which the aircraft industry's skeleton production is concentrating, but World War II types like the Mustang F-51. These are slower but have the longer cruising radius needed to fly from distant bases and provide tactical support for ground troops (see WAR IN ASIA). The U.S. had 4,600 such World War II planes in "moth balls" when the Korean war began and was rushing them into action. But Secretary Johnson had earlier this year cut back, from 24 to 16 squadrons, the carrier-based planes which were also now badly needed for close support work.

Nonetheless, existing orders, if inadequate, had at least been sufficient to enable all the major U.S. airplane builders to maintain enough technicians, skilled workers and tools to be ready to start the push to full throttle whenever the Government gave the word.

Off the Line. In Seattle last week, Boeing, with the biggest military backlog of all ($366 million), was concentrating on the B-47 medium jet bomber. To

North American Aviation in Los Angeles, the U.S. had assigned $284 million, partly for 55 models of the first airplane specifically designed to carry an atomic bomb--the carrier-based AJ1 jet-assisted attack bomber. For production of the Air Force's long-range B-36 bomber, Consolidated Vultee had $250 million in Government orders. Lockheed had the fast F94 on the assembly line (see cut) as part of a $225 million backlog. A jet-powered fighter, the F94 has search radar housed in its ball-like plastic nose, can seek out and destroy enemy aircraft approaching through thick clouds and darkness.

All the other famous names of World War II--Douglas, Grumman, Fairchild Engine & Airplane, Martin, Northrop, Republic--are at work. All told, they are making only 215 planes a month, compared to World War II's peak (in March 1944) of 9,117. For the U.S. to reach such a figure again, as United Aircraft's President H. Mansfield Horner pointed out last week, would require three full years of production. It would take the aircraft engine industry a full year, said Horner, to triple today's production of 5,000 engines a year, another year to boost production sevenfold. At the end of the third year it could match the World War II peak of 260,000 engines.

The time had not yet come when the industry needed to be put on full war production; to do so, without full wartime controls, would strain the whole economy to the cracking point. But the U.S. did need to step up aircraft production to meet the minimum needs of even a limited war. Plainly the time for it to start doing so was now.

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