AVIATION: Dogfight

Northwest Airlines, whose ads have sung the praises of its fleet of ten Boeing Stratocruisers, last week sued Boeing Airplane Co. for $24.7 million over the planes. The charges: Boeing had delivered the Stratocruisers 2½ years late (costing Northwest $17.2 million in traffic revenue and extra expenses), and the planes had so many bugs that Northwest had to spend more than $6,000,000 getting rid of them.

“The Stratocruiser is a wonderful plane,” Northwest’s President Croil Hunter hastened to add. “It is the greatest passenger airplane flying today. But we had to spend a lot of money making corrections which should have been done in the original design.” All told, Northwest lost so much time in maintenance, Hunter added, that “originally we could get only three hours daily use out of each airplane, compared to ten or twelve hours from a DC-4. We have now got it up to six hours a day by making the changes ourselves.”

Boeing admitted that its deliveries to Northwest had been delayed. It said this was caused by 1) new regulations which the Civil Aeronautics Authority ordered for all passenger planes, and 2) a strike which closed Boeing’s plant for 20 weeks last year. Rejoined Boeing: “We find it difficult to understand why Northwest … is taking this . . . action.”