Word: schwimmer
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...strain. Its first two tries at building executive jets seemed to have flopped expensively, and its attempts to refurbish and resell old planes appeared to be sputtering. Shortly before the war, Moshe Dayan, then head of the Defense Ministry, tried to oust the company's boss, Al Schwimmer...
...plain-spoken former grease monkey and TWA flight engineer from Bridgeport, Conn., Schwimmer can barely speak Hebrew after 22 years in Israel. Many military men were troubled by the key role that a civilian with a U.S. passport was playing in their country's defense. Israel's Connecticut Yankee has survived, however, and not just because Dayan has been replaced by Shimon Peres, a Schwimmer champion for years. Pressed by mounting criticism and Dayan's maneuvering, Schwimmer decided just before the October war to reveal I.A.I.'s balance sheet for the first time-and the figures...
Much more important for Schwimmer, I.A.I.'s planes and weapons performed well during the October war. The company's own fighter, the Barak (Hebrew for lightning), did especially well: of the 70 planes that saw combat, only three were lost. The plane carries a General Electric jet engine in an Israeli-built French Mirage III C, the plans for which were spirited out of France when Charles de Gaulle cut off deliveries to Israel after the Six-Day War in 1967. It is the first fighter ever manufactured in Israel, and a special feather in Schwimmer...
I.A.I.'s image might have improved much sooner were it not for Schwimmer's predilection for secrecy (he is a prime potential target for Arab terrorists). During Israel's 1948 war for independence, he smuggled nine war-surplus C-46s and a Constellation out of the U.S. to Israel (on the pretext of starting a civilian line in Panama), then surrendered to the FBI and was fined $10,000 for violating the U.S. arms embargo to Palestine. The smuggling helped create the Israeli Air Force, in which Schwimmer served as its first chief engineer. After...