Word: airbuses
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...lost on Government contracts, Lockheed has taken more than its share of tumbles. Over the years, it rolled up $480 million in losses on four military projects. In February, already cash-starved, it ran into even more trouble on its biggest venture into commercial aircraft: the L-1011 TriStar airbus. Rolls-Royce, supplier of engines for the TriStar, went into receivership and the British government refused to finance production of the engines unless the U.S. Government assured it that Lockheed could pay for them...
...agent of trouble was that symbol of technology, the jet engine. In 1968 Rolls-Royce won an international competition to build the engines for the Lockheed L-1011 airbus, a 256-pas-senger trijet that is supposed to start flying for TWA and Eastern late this fall. Britons had hailed the contract award as a triumph of export salesmanship by Rolls, but it proved instead to be ruinous. Rolls agreed to deliver 540 engines for the "TriStar" at a fixed price of $156 million; by last November it had concluded that the cost of building them would be more than...
...Chairman Daniel Haughton pronounced himself "completely surprised and appalled." Well might he be; Lockheed, too, is in precarious financial shape, and had been counting mightily on the L-1011 to help it recover from a series of staggering losses on military contracts. That will hardly be possible if the airbus becomes a plane without engines...
Lockheed showed off its first giant L-1011 "airbus," which gleamed under the hangar lights like a winged dolphin. While company officials sat proudly by, Governor Ronald Reagan called the new plane "one of the most sophisticated commercial jetliners ever produced." Several days later, in a neat bit of oneupmanship, McDonnell Douglas brought in Vice President Spiro Agnew to speak at the roll-out of its new airbus, the DC-10. Large enough to accommodate 270 passengers, the new planes are intended to displace the 747 on many medium-range hauls...
Both planes have three jet engines, are approximately 175 feet long and 19 feet wide inside the cabin; the 747 is 231 feet long and 20 feet wide. The first airbuses, which fly at up to 600 m.p.h., can operate profitably on routes from 250 to 1,500 miles. The 747 usually hauls up to 392 passengers at 590 m.p.h. and has a range of 6,500 miles. McDonnell Douglas already has orders for a stretched-out airbus that will have a range of 6,100 miles, enough to hop the Atlantic...