MANAGEMENT: Titan's Troubles

Chairman George M. Bunker of the Martin Co. announced last week that he would take personal charge of the company's Titan ICBM program and revamp the whole operation. All missile production, testing and launching will be brought into a new division, with headquarters shifted from Baltimore to Denver, where Martin produces the Titan. Denver's current boss, Howard W. ("Bucky") Merrill, will stay on as a Martin vice president, but relinquish top operational control of the Titan program to Bunker, who is moving to Denver.

On the Pad. Bunker's action came none too soon. The Titan, on which the U.S. has spent some $1.2 billion to date, is in trouble. After four preliminary successful shoots (none beyond the first stage), the missile designed to be more sophisticated than Convair's Atlas has not been able to get off the pad for seven months.

While the number of Titans built is secret, best guess is that 35 have come off the lines, of which five have been lost in accidents; another nine have been damaged, and of the nine, only two of the birds could be put back into flight condition. The accidents did not stem from any basic flaw in design. Most of the troubles came from unrelated, random-type failures that plague every missile, including the Atlas, which failed five times in a row earlier this year before the bugs were taken out. The big problem is that Martin has had not only routine troubles but so many plain, ordinary goofs. Among them: a Titan suffered ruptured tanks and ripped skin at Denver in August, when workers failed to follow specified fueling procedures, pumped fuel into the tanks at too rapid a rate. Another was severely damaged while being airlifted to Cape Canaveral in October, when Martin workers failed to open valves inside the missile so that it could "breathe" during the flight; pressure differences caused an implosion that cracked the oxygen tank.

Pressure & Management. Part of the blame can be laid to the pressures inherent in a crash program. But as the failures pile up, Martin is getting so edgy (Martin crews call their pads at Canaveral "the inferiority complex") that the experts accuse it of becoming "fail-safe happy," of burdening the Titan with too many extra safety relays and circuits, gadgets that in themselves fail.

Pressure is only part of it. More and more missilemen suspect that the real problem is Martin's management. Critics point to a series of personnel shifts, con fusion and poor morale throughout the company. At times, the troubleshooters sent out from Baltimore only stepped on each other's toes, and compounded the trouble they were sent to fix. For some plant areas, everything operates by word of mouth. In others red tape is so thick that the head of a subdepartment must clear everything he does with his department chief. Martin's men at Cape Canaveral are as good as any. Yet they complain of silly rules that forbid coffee or Coke breaks (one Denver scientist was recently dismissed for drinking Coke from a Thermos at his desk). Ten topnotch engineers of Martin's missile-test group recently went looking for new jobs as a group because, as one engineer said, "I'd like to work in a happy shop for a change."