Word: fokker
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When Frans Swarttouw took over the sleepy Dutch aircraft manufacturer Fokker a decade ago, he predicted the little company would survive only "if it dares to start digging in the front garden of the American airplane manufacturers." Never has the garden been greener than now. With U.S. airlines expanding their fleets and replacing aging jets, the two major American aircraft makers, Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, have enough orders to keep them busy through the early 1990s...
...backlog has created a perfect opening for Fokker, which started producing the compact Fokker 100 jetliner in 1987. The company scored a major coup last week when American Airlines announced plans to buy 75 Fokker 100s, to be delivered in the next six years, and an option to purchase 75 more later on. The American deal, worth as much as $3 billion, is the largest foreign contract ever won by a Dutch company...
...cost of developing the new F-100 almost throttled Fokker, which the Dutch government had to bail out with loans that grew to $700 million by 1987. The new F-100, designed to carry about 100 passengers on trips of 1,000 miles or less, is as technologically advanced as the offerings of Fokker's larger rivals. Powered by Rolls-Royce engines, the plane is highly fuel efficient and quiet. In test flights in February, the F-100 performed well within the toughest airport-noise restrictions...
Basler's business has more to do with economics than nostalgia. A modern small cargo jet or a commuter plane, like the Fokker F-27, commands $5 million to $8 million. But Basler can deliver his converted DC-3s for less than $3 million. Furthermore, a DC-3 averages 18 minutes of maintenance for every hour of flying time, less than the 55 minutes of work needed to keep an F-27 aloft for an hour...
...result was a degree of paralysis that few nations ever experience. For three days last week, Bangladesh's only transportation link with the outside world was a pair of aging Fokker Friendship propjets that took off from a relatively short taxiway at Dhaka's otherwise flooded international airport, carrying small loads of passengers to and from Calcutta. Roads and railways were cut, and even ferryboats stopped running, because their terminals were flooded. At one point, only a handful of helicopters connected the capital with the rest of the country. By week's end, as the floodwaters started to recede...