The SST: Riding A Technological Tiger

THE U.S. has seldom been reluctant to embrace either technological change or the challenge of great national projects. It is a sign of the questioning times that disquiet now attends a project of just such dimensions: the supersonic transport aircraft. Last week, when President Nixon announced his decision to spend $96 million this year and more than $1 billion later on to underwrite SST development, the cheers came mainly from the manufacturers and airlines that stand to profit most.

Far from being final, the decision now shifts to Congress, which must pass the appropriations. A spirited debate has raged within the Administration for seven months. Opposing the SST were Nixon’s science aide, Lee DuBridge, and Hendrik Houthakker of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. Supporting it were Secretary of Transportation John Volpe, Federal Aviation Administrator John Shaffer, and a genuine American hero, Charles A. Lindbergh, who personally presented the case for the SST to the President.

Proponents of the SST have a compelling economic argument. U.S. aircraft have dominated world skies for 25 years or more, and last year $1.7 billion worth was sold abroad, the nation’s largest single item of capital goods export. Now U.S. supremacy seems threatened. The British-French Concorde, which will carry up to 144 passengers at 1,400 m.p.h., is scheduled to fly supersonically for the first time this month and to go into regular service in 1973. The Soviets are even further ahead; their TU-144 has already logged nearly 200 hours of flight, and may fly passengers supersonically next year to Expo ’70 at Osaka, Japan.

The U.S. supersonic will not be test-flown until 1972, and will probably not enter service until 1978. Seattle’s Boeing Co. has designed it to be a second-generation SST, leapfrogging the European competition. Compared with the Concorde, it will be bigger, faster and cheaper to operate. The airlines have taken 74 options on the Concorde, but have reserved 122 delivery positions on the Boeing SST assembly line.

$40 Million a Plane. Yet the SST raises a troublesome question: what is its proper place in the scheme of national priorities? Granted that money saved by delaying the SST would not likely be spent in the ghettos, it is still debatable whether a supersonic transport is a better investment than, say, an aircraft that could take off and land downtown. Every previous generation of aircraft has been cheaper, safer and more comfortable than the one before, but the SST is only faster. It will be no more comfortable and no more economical to operate than the 362-passenger Boeing 747 jumbo jet, which is due to enter service next year.

The Government has spent $450 million so far on feasibility and design studies. Nixon’s proposal would commit the Government to invest another $1.3 billion to build two prototypes. After that, Boeing and its suppliers are expected to finance the early production costs, which will bring the overall total to about $3 billion. Under a tough contract with Boeing, Washington will recover its investment when the 300th aircraft is sold. The Government will turn a $1 billion profit if sales reach the Federal Aviation Administration’s predicted minimum of 500 by 1990—a return that works out to less than that from putting the money in the bank.

One factor affecting the size of the market—and the fares—will be the selling price of the SST, now calculated at $40 million a plane. The price of developing new airplanes has an unsettlingly steep rate of climb. The Concorde’s development costs so far have almost quadrupled to $1.72 billion, and the price tag has risen from $ 12 million a plane to $21 million.

20th Century Sound. In a market of 500 SSTs, Boeing’s profit will be a handsome $3.5 million on every $40 million aircraft sold. The SST will create 25,000 new jobs at Boeing, and another 25,000 among a host of subcontractors, chiefly General Electric, which has engines virtually ready to attach to Boeing’s airframe. To forestall criticism that the SST will create few jobs in the ghettos, Boeing is seeking more black engineers.

Beyond economics, there is the question of the sonic boom, which can vary in decibel level from a shot to a 50-mile wide swath of thunderous sound, and would annoy groundlings, to say the least. Transportation Secretary Volpe last week promised that the SST will fly supersonically only over water, at least until the sonic boom is brought within “acceptable limits.” Three countries—Sweden, Ireland and West Germany—have already banned SSTs over their territory. The FAA calculates that if all restrictions on supersonic flight were removed, the eventual market would jump from 500 SSTs to 1,200, adding $28 billion to sales. Thus there will always be a powerful temptation to remove the speed restrictions and subject Americans to what Boeing calls the “20th century sound.”

There is no doubt that the SST, like the jets before it, will lure more passengers into the air. A recent survey conducted for TWA revealed that two-thirds of all passengers responding would prefer to fly supersonically, and 56% would pay a premium of $50 to do so on a 2,000-mile flight. Still, each SST will cost more than most airlines earn in a single year. Even now, the airlines are stretching the tight money market to pay for the new generation of subsonic jumbo jets and airbuses, and smaller lines only wish that the SST would quietly go away for several years. As soon as the leading airlines buy the SST, however, competition will dictate that all must follow.

The SST remains inevitable so long as the Concorde and the Soviet TU-144 are in the air. Yet their threat to U.S. technology could prove to be a mirage. In 1964, Britain tried to cancel the Concorde because of rising costs, but was prevented from doing so by Charles de Gaulle’s insistence that Britain live up to its contract. France’s new President Georges Pompidou may be more amenable to the idea. As for the Soviet entry, it is largely an unreal threat; no Western airline could risk relying on Russia for spare parts.

The big push to build the SST now emanates from the sheer momentum of technology. After the SST will come the hypersonic transport, with speeds of 5,000 m.p.h., and then suborbital flight. Each step will eventually be taken for the same reason that man climbed Mount Everest: it was there, waiting to be conquered. The still unresolved questions, which Congress must answer, are whether technology must move at a forced-march pace, and whether the boom of supersonic flight in the 1970s is worth the proposed investment of national talent and treasure.