A Tale of Two Cities

For four years, the fates of two companies, their workers and their communities hung on a single Army contract for a helicopter known as UTTAS (Utility Tactical Transport Aircraft System). In December the Army announced the winner: Sikorsky of Stratford, Conn., which stands to reap perhaps $4 billion in sales over the next ten years. The loser, Boeing Vertol in Ridley Township, Pa., a suburb of Philadelphia, must now contend with doubts about its survival as a primary aircraft maker. To gauge the impact of the biggest helicopter award in 20 years, TIME Correspondent Eileen Shields visited both plants. Her report:

Sikorsky's slogan was UTTAS HAS A U IN IT; Boeing Vertol's was WIN WITH UTTAS. Since March 1972, when the competition for the assault helicopter began, these phrases have turned up on bumper stickers, plant posters, windows of local bars and gas stations, and T shirts. The boosterism was understandable: both companies needed UTTAS desperately. As divisions of larger concerns --Sikorsky of United Technologies Corp., Vertol of Boeing Co.--neither publishes separate sales and profit figures, but it is scarcely any secret that both have been hurt badly by declining military orders for helicopters since the Viet Nam War was at its height.

In 1969 Vertol employed 13,900 people to make 30 helicopters a month; by last year employment had sunk to 5,500 and production to two aircraft a month. Sikorsky's employment plunged from 11,000 to 6,200 in the same period, and its plant in 1976 was working at only 22% of capacity; for the first time since it started manufacturing helicopters 37 years ago, the company did not have a single Government contract. As the companies' fortunes declined, so did those of the decaying industrial river valleys in which they are camped. Unemployment hovers at about 12% around the Vertol plant in the Delaware Valley, and 10% in Sikorsky's Housatonic Valley.

So tension ran high on Dec. 23, the date for the award. At both plants it was the last day of work before a ten-day vacation, and the scenes began identically: as noon approached, workers began preparing for annual lunch-in parties (no liquor, but lots of special things to eat). A few minutes after 12, the grapevines came alive with news of Sikorsky's victory.

At Vertol, workers heard their president's shaken voice over the p. a. system: "This is Howard Stuverude speaking. I am extremely disappointed that we were not selected." Over a din of boos and hisses, one worker who felt that "disappointed" was too weak a description for his feelings, jeered, "Peanuts!" Recalls Union Leader Robert McHugh: "Instead of a Christmas celebration, it was more like a wake." Not so 150 miles north, in Stratford. Sikorsky President Gerald Tobias raced out of his office and hopped on an electric golf cart to tour the plant, shouting the news to machinists, assemblers and engineers. Says Riveter Maria Ferreira, 54: "It was like the war ended. Everyone went crazy, clapping, screaming, yelling."

New Hiring. The euphoria has not abated. Some Sikorsky workers, sure of their jobs for the next decade, have gone on spending sprees. Says Precision Grinder Elwood Worcester, 44: "I bought my wife a new car for Christmas, a $6,200 Chevrolet. We are going to Europe this summer; because now I can spend some of my savings and put it back later, I don't have to worry." For some junior executives, the UTTAS contract means instant advancement. Ken Rosen, 36, was propulsion manager for UTTAS; now he is engineering manager for the whole program. "UTTAS certainly advanced me into a senior management position," he says. "If I do a creditable job here, all sorts of opportunities will open up."

UTTAS means opportunity to the surrounding area too. Sikorsky's Tobias estimates that Connecticut's economy will benefit to the tune of $60 million a year and every new job at Sikorsky will create "two to 2 1/2 outside." But Sikorsky is cautious about new hiring: the firm will add only 400 to 500 people this year and a maximum of 2,000 by 1980. That means disappointment for most of the 6,000 skilled and semiskilled job seekers who have come to pound on the plant door since Sikorsky won the award.

Some of the seekers are former Vertol employees. The losing company has already laid off 550 workers, and many more fear their turn may come next. Says Jesse Butler, 49, "I'm ten men from going out the door." In November, after 14 years at Vertol, Butler was bumped down from an R.-and-D. mechanic to utility man, which means he is "down the drain $2,000 a year." Toolmaker Hubert Willis, 44, after 13 1/2 years at the company, was laid off last October. Says he: "I felt I would be coming back because we would get UTTAS. I wasn't thinking about getting a car or anything like that, but putting my daughter through school. How am I going to do that now?"

Defeat has a bitter taste for Vertol management as well. Says Vice President Charles Ellis, who headed the UTTAS project: "I haven't worked on anything else for six years. That's a lot of my life to invest in a program and be unsuccessful." However, he is gamely trying to forget and concentrate on winning the next big project: the $700 million Light Airborne Multi-Purpose System (LAMPS) helicopter contract to be awarded by the Navy this spring. Vertol managers claim they have solved the vibration problems that plagued their UTTAS models, and so have high hopes.

Anxiety too. Says Union Leader McHugh: "I don't see a way for the company to stay open without LAMPS." President Stuverude, noting that Vertol has diversified into making railroad cars, scoffs at such talk as "a bunch of conjecture." Besides, he says firmly, "we are going to win LAMPS." Maybe--but the design will be based on UTTAS, and the main competitor once again is Sikorsky.

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