Fresh Eggs

"An airplane is like an egg. It has to be sold when fresh."

This is one of the favorite sayings of North American Aviation Inc.'s white-haired Chairman James Howard Kindelberger. Last week bustling "Dutch" Kindelberger got himself a vast, new henhouse, where he hoped to hatch the freshest eggs in the industry.

With the U.S. Navy's blessing, North

American took over the Navy's big (1,400,000 sq. ft.) reserve aircraft plant at Columbus, Ohio, which Curtiss-Wright Corp. had been using to make parts and modify planes. North American thus boosted its plane-building space by one-third, the biggest single expansion in the industry since the Korean war began. (Curtiss-Wright will give up airframe building and concentrate on engines.)

Though security regulations forced Dutch Kindelberger to keep mum, the industry had some plausible guesses on what new jobs had been handed to him. North American is already building the AJ-1, the Navy's first carrier-based bomber capable of carrying the atomic bomb. Its production will likely be stepped up at Columbus. There was also a strong hint that North American will begin production of McDonnell Aircraft's carrier-based Banshee jet fighter (TIME, Oct. 23).

Obsolete Planes. Dutch Kindelberger, who built 14% of all U.S. war planes in World War II, knows from experience how fast a plane can become outdated. North American, whose F-86 Sabre jet fighter set a world speed record of 671 m.p.h. in 1948, knew that its improved versions, the F-86B and F-86C, were in Dutch's own words "obsolete before they got off the drawing board." It is now producing the F-86D and F-86E, and in Engineer Kindelberger's view, they are obsolete too. When the Navy wanted a long-range bomber big enough to carry the Abomb, it turned to Kindelberger. The result was the AJ-1, with one turbojet and two reciprocating engines.

That was a big reason why North American last week had the industry's fourth biggest backlog, an estimated $410 million. Its sales have risen from 1947's low of $20 million to $124 million last year and have continued to climb this year. Last week, North American declared a 75-c- quarterly dividend.

Obsolete Pilots. Nevertheless, Kindelberger thinks the piloted airplane itself is rapidly heading toward obsolescence as a military weapon; he regards the guided missile as the freshest egg in the basket and believes that North American is its leading mother hen. At the Government's test site at Alamogordo, N. Mex., North American's "NATIV" (North American Test Instrument Vehicle) has soared ten miles high at supersonic speeds. His aerophysics laboratory at Downey, Calif, is ready for actual production of missiles controlled from ground to ground.

But Kindelberger says flatly that those who think that missiles would be a cheap way to wage war are dead wrong. The U.S., he likes to point out, has so far spent $300 million on guided missiles ("only a starter"), while Nazi Germany spent $2 billion in developing the V-2 rocket alone--"a comparatively simple device." Says Kindelberger, prophet of the push-button war: "The public has no conception yet of what the guided missile means. The time is coming when the defense of the U.S. will be pretty much automatic."

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