Word: pratt
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...carpets. No one cared that she looked unhip in her blue matron's outfits. Fame, especially enduring fame, is the California dream, and she is transcendently famous without even trying, the embodiment of an institution as old and grand as a giant sequoia. Los Angeles Electrician Raymond Pratt, 32, waited three hours to glimpse the Queen briefly. "She is one of the few things in life that is still sacred," he said. Her presence Stateside, in any event, is special: no reigning British monarch had been to the U.S. at all until 1939, when George VI, the current Queen...
...real bonanza, though, is in spare parts. An Air Force audit revealed that Pratt and Whitney has quietly increased the price of one part, a turbine air seal, from $16 to more than $3000, supposedly to correct an accounting error in the original price--the audit uncovered scores of such "corrections." Overall, the defense industry has, for the past two years, sustained an inflation rate of 20 percent--more than double the national average...
...Oklahoma's Tinker Air Force Base, watchdogs programmed their computers to detect increases of 300% or more in the cost of spare parts for aircraft engines charged by the Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Group of United Technologies in fiscal year 1982. The results, said an auditor, were "staggering." Robert S. Hancock, an official of the Air Logistics Center near Oklahoma City, said that in just the one year, Pratt & Whitney's "repricing" policy had cost the Government "something on the order of $140 million." He termed the findings "only the tip of the iceberg" and contended that Pratt & Whitney...
...preliminary Air Force findings included 35 examples of especially astounding price increases. Pratt & Whitney, for example, charged the Air Force $16 for a turbine air seal on engines that power the F-111 fighter in 1981; a year later it priced the same part at $3,033.82-an increase of 1,886% at a time when inflation was running at 8.9%. The firm's explanation: its own clerk had listed the 1981 price too low. A part used in mounting engines in C-141 transports and B-52H bombers rose in price from $77.28 to $1,016.70, an increase...
Officials of Pratt & Whitney, which last year sold nearly $3 billion worth of aircraft engines, spare parts and services to the U.S. military, said they had reviewed the $140 million in total increases and found that $101 million "has been justified." The remaining $39 million, they said, would be "negotiated" with the Government. The company claimed that its spare-parts prices had risen about 20% in each of the past two years, "representative of the aerospace industry." But Hancock disputes this, arguing that the price of Pratt & Whitney spares went well beyond "an average price increase." The Air Force...