ARMAMENT: Enough Planes?

In his report to the nation last Dec. 15, President Truman predicted: “Within a year, we will be turning out planes at five times the present rate of production.” By last week, four months later, planemakers were nowhere near meeting Harry Truman’s happy schedule.

Production was estimated at a mere 315 planes a month, compared to 265 at the time of Truman’s speech. By the end of this year, at the present rate of increase, output will be 500 a month, less than double last December’s output. Production for all of 1951 probably will not reach 5,000 planes, compared to 26,277 in the year of Pearl Harbor and to 96,318 in 1944.

Was the aircraft industry falling down on the job? The planemakers and the Pentagon did not think so. The answer, said one Midwest manufacturer last week, was that Harry Truman had “shot off his face on something he didn’t know anything about.”

Gamble on 1953. Actually, there had never been any plans to expand production fivefold this year. The Defense Department, gambling that Russia will not be ready to attack until 1953, concentrated on getting the plane manufacturers to expand their plants and get ready for a big jump in production if needed in two years. For example, Northrop Aircraft, loaded with a $300 million backlog chiefly to produce the Air Force’s Scorpion F89 all-weather interceptor, had rearranged its plant “to create more efficient flow lines,” had thus channeled men and materials away from current production. In Santa Monica, Douglas Aircraft plucked skilled supervisors from its assembly lines, shipped them and a batch of machine tools to Tulsa as the nucleus of a new production staff for the six-jet Boeing B-47V bomber. And instead of “freezing” their designs for mass production, most manufacturers were slowing down production from time to time, retooling for improved models.

Even the 670-m.p.h. F-86 Sabre, now spearheading the air fight against Russian-built MIG-15s in Korea, has been held back from mass production while North American Aviation improves the plane. North American has put three distinct models of the Sabre in production.

Bottlenecks Ahead. Airframe production cannot be stepped up until the bottleneck is broken in electronic equipment and engines. Last week, United Aircraft Corp. was spreading out over 1,000,000 square feet of extra floor space to expand engine production. But President H. M. Homer warned: “There is no miracle that can be substituted for time.” At best, United and other engine makers can triple their production this year—and the airframe makers are hitched to that schedule. Fairchild is making only eight of its cargo-carrying Cng “Flying Boxcars” a month, could produce 20 if it could get engines. Boeing is sitting on part of its billion-dollar backlog, waiting for Pratt & Whitney engines for its B50 medium bomber.

Nevertheless, most aircraft makers are up to the schedules set by the Defense Department. The planned production curve climbs slowly to a peak of 15,000-18.000 planes in 1953, then levels off to a yearly rate of 9,000 to 11,000. So much new capacity will have been built by that time that the U.S. will be able to turn out 50,000 planes a year, if war comes in 1953. But if war comes before then, the planemakers will not be able to give the U.S. the planes it needs, even to make good on the President’s forecast.