West Germany: Aerospace Alliance

The fertile brains of German scientists gave the world its first military missiles and jet planes. After the war, the U.S. took over the technological lead, bringing its vast resources to bear on rocketry and space exploration. Last week an important corporate alliance joined the two traditions. In another of the expansion moves by U.S. firms that have so irritated many Europeans, Seattle’s Boeing Co., the foremost U.S. producer of strategic-weapons systems, acquired a one-third interest in Bölkow GmbH, West Germany’s most avant-garde aerospace research and development firm (1963 sales: $23.5 million).

The two companies fit each other’s needs. For Boeing, which paid $2,000,000 in cash and $1,000,000 in long-term credits, the deal pries open a position in the growing European aerospace market —now dominated by the French—at a time when the company faces a shrinking backlog of U.S. defense work. For Bölkow, rich in brains but shy of capital, it not only provides cash but leads to easier financing in a field that devours development funds in multimillion-dollar gulps.

Merging his brainpower with somebody else’s capital has already become a successful formula for Founder Ludwig Bölkow, 52, who designed Messerschmitt’s earliest jet fighter during World War II. When Germany resumed aircraft and arms production in 1956, Bölkow lined up $306,000 in capital from a Hamburg banker, shifted his tiny Stuttgart engineering firm into the development of complete weapons systems. First came the Cobra, a tank-killer rocket that was adopted by the German army, was sold to Denmark and Italy, and got Bölkow into antitank and antiaircraft rocket research with France’s Nord-Aviation. Bölkow today produces a popular helicopter trainer, two light sports airplanes, a glass-fiber glider, thrust-measuring devices, micropumps and a digital data-processing system. It is also one of three firms working on the third stage of Europe’s ten-nation commercial satellite program.

The center of Bölkow’s operation is its Ottobrunn idea factory, a closely guarded cluster of buildings in a dense forest outside Munich. From it has come such hardware as an experimental helicopter whose swiveling rotor blades will enable it to fly at a record 310 m.p.h., a heavy-duty rotor system that jets exhaust gases through the tips of hollow blades, and the VJ 101 vertical-takeoff fighter plane. With such help as he will get from Boeing, Ludwig Bölkow fully expects to help make Germany once again a major competitor in the world’s air.