Aerospace: No End in Sight

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The aerospace industry as a whole last year saw sales jump to a record $20.9 billion, with its backlog of orders hitting an $18.6 billion peak. This was the same industry that, after its post-Sputnik missile and satellite surge, felt its fortunes sag. As recently as 1964, the management consultant firm of Arthur D. Little, Inc., declared flatly: "Aerospace is no longer a growing market." Today the Little expert who presided over that report readily admits: "The Viet Cong made a liar out of me." This is true—for the moment. Without question, the U.S. military buildup in Viet Nam gave new life to the aero space companies. But the industry, having learned its lesson the hard way in hard times, has also entered a new era of diversification and innovation, of producing and planning for peace.

The Sporty Course. The industry now sells more than 40% of its hardware and sophisticated technology for peaceful pursuits. These range from helping in the attempt to put men on the moon to mining the riches of the sea, from operating Job Corps training centers to searching for membranes and motive power that would keep an artificial heart beating 20 years inside the human breast. The aerospace business is even bringing its massive brainpower—nearly half of the scientists and engineers employed by U.S. private industry—to bear in devising new ways to fight crime, reduce air pollution or control government red tape.

Aerospace employs more men and women (1,180,000) than any other manufacturing industry in the U.S. (runner up: textiles, with 934,000). Newspaper help-wanted columns bulge with ads for optical thermodynamicists, cryogenicists and avionics-systems experts.

The industry's 50,000 suppliers reach into almost every community in the nation; yet its prime plants are so concentrated in a few states and cities that aerospace fortunes can make or break the economies of those centers. General Dynamics and Bell Helicopter provide a third of the manufacturing jobs in Fort Worth. Boeing now plans to up its Seattle work force from 64,000 to 80,000, and there are delighted complaints about how this will put a real strain on the area's housing and school facilities. Lockheed is chiefly based in California, but its huge Georgia plant at Marietta, the size of 93 football fields, is so important to the state that Senator Richard Russell, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, felt that it would help his political future if Lockheed won the contract for the C-5A transport; after a visit to the White House, Russell exultantly leaked the news two days before it was supposed to become official. Lockheed's 22,000 Marietta employees celebrated with a spree of buying autos, appliances, houses and summer cottages.

As for California, which holds 22% of prime military and 41% of prime NASA contracts, aerospace is indispensable. With 33% of the state's 1,500,000 manufacturing employees on aerospace payrolls, California owes to the industry the fact that it is now the nation's most populous state. According to a Bank of America estimate, aerospace jobs have drawn at least 1,670,000 people to California in a decade.