CORPORATIONS: Genius at Work

On the nation’s crowded airways, 254 commercial and private planes collided in flight between 1948 and 1955, and there is an average of four near misses a day. After last June’s collision of two commercial aircraft over the Grand Canyon took 128 lives (TIME, July 9), the search for a warning device to prevent such disasters in the future became a major concern of U.S. airlines. Last week the airlines finally thought they had found what they wanted. The Air Transport Association approved a collision alarm system blueprinted by Collins Radio Co. of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a company as little known to the public as it is famed in aviation.

Both United Air Lines and American Airlines were negotiating last week with Collins to equip their entire fleets with the alarms, at a cost of about $6,000 to $8,000 each. Within two years Collins plans to start installing the device, which will automatically alert the pilot when another aircraft comes within two miles, show him the position of the intruding plane through a system of lights. By 1959 Collins expects to have an improved model that will show the pilot which way to maneuver in order to avert a collision, may even do the whole job automatically.

Echo from the Moon. The collision warner is the latest electronics breakthrough by Arthur A. Collins, 47, the company’s founder-president and electronics genius. Collins has captured 80% of the U.S. commercial-airlines market and 60% to 70% of the free-world foreign market in airborne electronics, i.e., equipment for navigation, instrument landing, flight direction, automatic piloting, weather radar. His equipment operates along the U.S.’s and Canada’s far northern Distant Early Warning (DEW) line. His young company, which grew from a gross of $722,000 in 1940 to $123 million in fiscal 1956, has bounced radio beams off the moon, shot a high-frequency TV beam 800 miles around the curvature of the earth to bring man closer to the goal of transoceanic television (TIME, May 19, 1952), developed a wingless aircraft, the “Aerodyne” (TIME, Jan. 9), and is now working on highly secret missile-guidance systems and earth satellites.

Art Collins, the publicity-shy son of an Iowa farmer and businessman, built his company upon his lifelong hobby, tinkering with radios. (His newest hobby: tinkering with sports cars.) At 15, he made a newspaper name for himself as a ham operator who contacted the U.S. naval expedition to the North Pole. In 1931, he started turning out ham radio transmitters from a Cedar Rapids basement. Two years later he formed a company with $29,000 in capital assets.

Start with No. Collins concentrated on high-precision, lightweight amateur radio equipment, soon branched into the growing market of airborne communications. The airlines and the Air Force came to know Art Collins as a bold researcher. In 1937, for example, the Federal Communications Commission had a rule limiting aircraft radio transmitters to 50 watts. Collins developed a 100-watt transmitter that he sold to Braniff Airways. Pink FCC violation slips piled on Braniff’s desk, but after a lengthy hassle, the FCC finally permitted Braniff and other carriers to raise their power. Says Collins: “In this business, everything begins with FCC saying no, and you start from there.”

Now Collins is pioneering in the development of new radio equipment that may revolutionize airborne radio communications. Collins’ system would almost double the number of available ground-air radio channels, would make possible a global communications system by which, for example, SAC’s General Curtis LeMay could make instant contact from his Omaha headquarters with any U.S. Strategic Air Command plane flying anywhere in the world. Toward this goal, Collins scored a historic first this summer. With Art Collins at the dials, a U.S. military plane flying atop the North Pole made radio contact with another U.S. craft hovering over the South Pole.

SSB for Jets. Collins worked for seven years to get to that point. He wanted to use a method of transmission called single side band (SSB)* instead of the amplitude modulation system used by airplanes. The problem was to cut the size of the bulky equipment needed for SSB, which sometimes occupied an entire room. Collins reduced one huge SSB filter to the size of a fist, trimmed its cost from almost $1,000 to $50. Because of this success, Collins figures that the first U.S. jetliners, going into operation in 1958 or 1959, will carry his SSB equipment.

By being able to foresee what equipment will be needed on the aircraft of the future, and by spending $13 million in the past year to develop it, Collins has piled up an order backlog of $110 million, mostly for the Government. His next objective is to expand in the only airborne-communications field in which he has yet to win a major interest: the rich and growing market for small executive aircraft.

* In amplitude modulation, the voice rides through space between transmitter and receiver on an electronic carrier and two sidebands. SSB filters out one of these side bands, thus takes only half as much space as AM on the spectrum of radio frequencies, vastly increases the number of airborne radio conversations that can be carried on.