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Aviation History
1960
1960 - 0659.PDF
Flight, IS May I960 659 on-dock dates by which the pieces of equipment must be avail-able for entry into his materiel systems to meet the aircraft pro- duction schedules. The facts of life being what they are, andthrough no fault of BOAC these deadlines were not always met. Here is an area of difficult negotiation—an area where hard cashpenalties are involved, and where an aircraft manufacturer with a reputation for on-time deliveries has earned the right to betough and usually is. Nevertheless, the first 707-436 has been delivered complete with the exception of one item, not of Britishmanufacture, and timely delivery of which could not reasonably have been contemplated. Some Other Bought-out Items As explained earlier, theConway engines were not to be customer-furnished equipment. Nevertheless, Rolls-Royce Ltd were required to work to an"on-dock" schedule for their deliveries into the Boeing plant. Precision planning, however, was set at naught by the fire at theRolls-Royce facility at Mount Sorrell and a recovery programme had to be initiated. The first six engines for the test programmehad been air-freighted from London to Seattle and this, for- tunately, provided the pattern and the experience for air freightageof the later ones. This gained six weeks of valuable time. At the Rohr plant at Auburn, near Renton, where the powerplants werebeing assembled and American items being installed, the flow time was drastically reduced; and finally Boeing revised their aircraftassembly sequence to accept a later input. Although BOAC only encouraged all this from the sidelines (and cajoled here and there),they take a Britisher's pride in the way the programme was salvaged for the benefit of all. Another item not strictly customer-furnished, but in whichBOAC and their representative have taken a hand, is the tyres with which the aircraft are delivered. To maintain a competitivesituation and to insure against dislocations in supply, Boeing pro- cure their tyres from several sources and fit them to productionaircraft by random withdrawals from stores. For BOAC a deal was set up under which the corporation paid in sterling for alltyres to Goodyear at Wolverhampton; Goodyear at Akron pro- vided tyres free issue to Boeing, and Boeing credited the corpora-tion dollars against the purchase price of the aircraft. BOAC thus economized on their dollar expenditure and at the same timereceived tyres of their choice on their aircraft. . When British material is imported into the USA for incorpora-tion into an aircraft which will subsequently be exported, the duty on the material is paid and, when exportation is made, 99 per centis recoverable under the drawback procedure. The stores account- ing is laborious; the time to recovery can be many years; no interest;s payable on the sequestered funds, and 1 per cent of the duty is charged to boot. In the case of the Conway engines somem million would have been lost to the corporation's use during this period. Accordingly, combined efforts were made by Boeingand BOAC to have the controlling statutes revised; and in April 1958 the Congress passed a bill which permitted the importationof the Conways upon posting of a bond of quite nominal size. The savings to the corporation in interest, documentation, andcontrol have been substantial indeed. The passage of the Bill has a still larger significance. It indicatesthat the United States has come a long way from isolationism into the world of reciprocal trade facilities. Certification The United States and Great Britain enjoyreciprocal agreements signed and effective in 1934. Aircraft manufactured in one country and certificated in accordance withthe airworthiness requirements applicable there will get valida- tion of the Certificates of Airworthiness for Export on entry uponthe receiving country's registry. The receiving country reserves the right to make such validation dependent upon the fulfilmentof any special conditions which are for the time being required for issuance of C of A under its own rules.The 707-436s for BOAC are certificated under these agreements. The FAA, in issuing these Certificates of Airworthiness for Export,will be certifying that the aircraft would qualify for an American C of A if this were requested. Also, as an expression of comity,they would not issue the certificates until they had assured them- selves that the special conditions raised by the ARB had been met,and that the validation by the British authority would follow as a matter of course. The special conditions include several major sections of thecurrent BCARs. Many of the special conditions were found to have been met by the adequate design-margins already in the air-craft, while others—such as the installation of the crash switches called for—were straightforward and relatively simple design-changes. (This particular requirement remained in until about two months short of delivery, at which time it was withdrawn.)Some areas, however, have been particularly troublesome owing to the differences in philosophy between the experts of the FAAand the ARB; but even here, during the progress of the work, there has been a certain converging of viewpoints.In the take-off regime differences of test methods were acute and it became necessary to repeat much of the test work at a highcost to BOAC. The differences in final results will probably be small, and the differences between the most liberal and the mostconservative results (whichever way round it happens to be), will probably be within the safety margin provided by either. Theresults prove neither method right nor wrong in an absolute sense,
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