AVIATION: Caught Flatfooted

Why are U.S. plane manufacturers behind the British in the development of jet transport planes? Last week Joseph J. O’Connell, chairman of the Civil Aeronautics Board, told the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce that the reason, in effect, was indecision by the planemakers and confusion in Washington.

“A year and a half ago … I toured a number of manufacturing plants and airline installations,” he said. “I was new enough to the business and just naive enough to believe that since jets were being built for and flown by the military they might be adapted to commercial operations in the relatively near future. The response that I got almost universally was that jets were at least ten years away.

“[Since then, both] the British and the Canadians [have test-flown] large jet transports and are now peddling them to the airlines of the world. We might well ponder the question of how American aviation got caught flatfooted.”

The answer, said CABoss O’Connell, was simply that U.S. planemakers were “naturally reluctant” to develop a jet transport ; they feared that they would not get enough orders to make up the development cost. “So long as military orders roll in,” said O’Connell, “and Washington debates what it is going to do [about paying for jet transport development], there is little reason to believe that any manufacturer will enter into the jet transport field.”