Aviation: Push for the SST

The U.S. plans for a supersonic transport have had as many ups and downs as a single-prop plane bulling its way through a thunderstorm. Last week President Johnson received the most optimistic report yet on the SST—a report that has suddenly brightened the plane's uncertain prospects. Prepared by the Commerce Department, it bases its favorable analysis of the 1,900-m.p.h., 150-passenger plane on several new economic and technical discoveries.

Government and industry have been spending $2,000,000 a month for research on the SST, about 75% of it Government funds. Work on the drawing boards and in the wind tunnels has produced important design improvements in both the SST's airframe (for which Boeing and Lockheed are competing) and engines (General Electric v. Pratt & Whitney). The airframe makers have discovered that a relatively small reduction in airframe weight produces a disproportionately larger increase in payload; a 1% reduction, for example, would increase the payload by 10%. National Aeronautics and Space Administration research has given increased hope for solving the problems of sonic boom. And estimates of the world market for the SST have been raised from 200 planes to 400.

All this has convinced many previously hesitant airline officials that the plane is commercially practical, and has turned the congressional head wind against the SST into a tail wind. "My gloom has been dispelled," says Mike Monroney, chairman of the Senate Aviation Subcommittee, who less than two years ago was nearly ready to abandon the SST. "I am convinced that it is now time to get our SST off the drawing board." Says Boeing President William M. Allen: "Boeing would be prepared to implement a construction program tomorrow."

Monroney is now proposing that the Administration underwrite a major part of the SST prototype-development program (the original stand of the U.S. airframe makers), wants to see both a Boeing and a Lockheed prototype. After flight tests and evaluation of the prototypes, the government would make its choice and the winning company would then build production-line ships with its own risk capital; the government would recover its development costs through a royalty arrangement. Washington has an increasingly powerful motivation for giving the go-ahead: if the SST market is forfeited to the British and French, who seem to have patched up their differences and are forging ahead with the Concorde, the U.S. would lose upwards of $10 billion in potential sales in the next dozen years.