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Aviation History
1948
1948 - 0115.PDF
JANUARY 22NP, 1948 FLIGHT American Newsletter 1947 in Retrospect : Commercial Mr Freight Increase : Financial Difficulties of Aircraft Industry By " KIBITZER " THE week that elapses between Christmas Day andJanuary first is one of the flat spots of the year.Christmas being over, one looks forward to a New Year that seems to have little to offer except threats of atomic annihilation or vetoes on progress! Consequently it is not a bad time to see if we can draw comfort from t has been done over the last twelve months. g But if we subject American aviation to such scrutiny, it shows a confusion pattern. Tremendous strides have been made in some directions, with depressing results in others. Outstanding is the development of sub-sonic, and perhaps sonic, speed research (on which the Americans have spent a very great deal of time and money—much more than any other country could afford). And they have also shown wrhat can be done in the commercial air freight business, which increased 126 per cent inter- nationally and in per cent domestically. In the way of military operational aircraft the Air Force and Navy have come out with some new, but not revolu- tionary, types, except perhaps for the Boeing XB-47. This aircraft was one of the Air Force's multi-engined jet medium-bomber programme, a programme which was com- pleted this past year. The Navy flight-tested four new fighters — the McDonnell Banshee, the Chance-Vought Pirate, the North American FJ-i, and the Grumman Panther. So far as new power units were concerned, nobody has found any short cut to the final goal of reliability with jet or airscrew-turbine engines, and the teething troubles here have followed the normal and expected pat- tern. There is a tendency on the part of the Air Force to place all their turbine production work in the hands of a few of the better known manufacturers, and there seems to be little hope of the smaller outside companies getting production orders. The Navy (due, it is said, to consider- able prodding by one of their best suppliers of carrier aircraft) have gone for the Rolls-Royce Nene, soon to be built under licence by Pratt and Whitney. Their decision to do this may well have been influenced by the knowledge that their rivals, the Air Force, had not got a production imagine of such high thrust ratings. The continued rivalry between these two branches of the fighting services is always an encouragement to progress! THE COMMERCIAL SITUATIONY ET with 1947 behind it the American aircraft industry as a whole has experienced one of the worst financial years in its history, with many of its members due to show considerable deficits. It is always dangerous to generalize when trying to pin down the reasons for such a state of affairs. The causes are too devious and too com- plex, but if you talk to a manufacturer and ask him why things are bad, he will probably give you the stock answer, "Not enough orders," and the airline operator will say, "Rising operational costs." But these replies do not give the whole story by any manner of means. I believe that the business men themselves are largely to blame. After the war the builders of aircraft expected too much. They were not only affected by the wave of over-optimism which swept the country, but they were over-capitalized, over- staffed, over-housed and over-forgetful. They no longer remembered the days before 1941 when a small, but com- paratively solvent, industry lived on orders and profits that were in line with a growing and still experimental industry. The war years had accustomed them to astro- nomical figures and they didn't want to return to earth. Likewise the airlines went off with too much of a rush on their post-war ideas. They were so used to tlie over- crowding of wartime transportation that they thought ..-.f it as a forecast for the future. They ordered, and bought, too many big aircraft. Their operating costs, aided by a frantic rise in the cost of living (the result ot the removal of price controls), went up and up. At the same time their schedule reliability went down. Bad weather caused severe delays during the winter months, and a series of fatal crashes (the domestic fatality rate rose from 1.24 per hundred million passenger miles in 1946 to 3.21 in 1947) all but broke some of them. Added to this was the ground- ing, first of the Constellations and then of the D.C.6s. All this served to undermine—perhaps unjustly—the reputa- tions of both builders and operators. The general public is a fickle friend, and competitive forms of, transport lost no time in cashing-in on the airlines' troubles. It is true that during the last quarter of 1947 their balance-sheets have shown improvement, but hardly enough to pull the larger companies out of the red. Even if certain of the smaller ones show an overall profit, the total deficit for the year for all the airline operators is likely to be considerably in excess of 10,000,000 dollars. (It was 11,000,000 dollars for the first nine months of the year.) The financial inability of the airlines to buy more com- mercial aircraft added to the manufacturers' troubles, and the Air Force and Navy hardly increased the dollar value of their purchases over those of 1946. Consequently the Aircraft Industries Association (the American equivalent of the S.B.A.C.) are forecasting a 1947 loss of some hundred million dollars for the manufacturing industry alone! Even in a country as rich as this one, no aircraft industry can absorb losses of this nature two years running, and some form of government assistance in 1948 will be essential. Another terrible problem is that introduced by the groundings of the Constellations and D.C.6s, and it now looks as though this latter will set the Douglas Company back by about four million dollars. To this must be added the losses incurred by the airlines themselves as a result, both of the crashes and the removal of the aircraft from their schedules, as it may be March, 1948, before all the D.C.6s are flying again. • It was the same with the Con- stellations last spring, when Lockheeds had to foot a crippling bill. These groundings should give us furiously to think, for they must not be allowed to occur in the future. Inasmuch as they appear to be directly attributable to development troubles in the earlier life of the aircraft, we may even have to reorganize our own ideas on progress to the extent of sacrificing untried features in a new design, and subjecting new types to much more extensive accelerated service trials. Ideally each new type should be the "logical develop- ment '' of its predecessor, it should not embody untested and untried features of any magnitude, and improvements must be guaranteed free of all teething troubles before passengers are carried. However desirable this may be in theory, competitive requirements and the speed of aeronautical progress will prevent it in practice. Yet there is no question that the present situation, where development in the sub- sonic field is demanding innovations, is fraught with danger. For safety's sake it does seem that each new type should, prior to its being placed in passenger service, he subjected to a much longer try-out period. This might -jft done by putting it on to mail or cargo runs for at least a year before it went over to passenger carrying. If operators and manufacturers complain—as they will—about such restrictive design programmes or delayed operational use.
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