Word: vertol
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...Boeing Vertol Company will repair and replace the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority's (MBTA) light rail vehicles (LRV) on the Green Line, and give $40 million to the MBTA under a settlement reached last week...
...Vertol, workers heard their president's shaken voice over the p. a. system: "This is Howard Stuverude speaking. I am extremely disappointed that we were not selected." Over a din of boos and hisses, one worker who felt that "disappointed" was too weak a description for his feelings, jeered, "Peanuts!" Recalls Union Leader Robert McHugh: "Instead of a Christmas celebration, it was more like a wake." Not so 150 miles north, in Stratford. Sikorsky President Gerald Tobias raced out of his office and hopped on an electric golf cart to tour the plant, shouting the news to machinists, assemblers...
Some of the seekers are former Vertol employees. The losing company has already laid off 550 workers, and many more fear their turn may come next. Says Jesse Butler, 49, "I'm ten men from going out the door." In November, after 14 years at Vertol, Butler was bumped down from an R.-and-D. mechanic to utility man, which means he is "down the drain $2,000 a year." Toolmaker Hubert Willis, 44, after 13½ years at the company, was laid off last October. Says he: "I felt I would be coming back because we would...
Defeat has a bitter taste for Vertol management as well. Says Vice President Charles Ellis, who headed the UTTAS project: "I haven't worked on anything else for six years. That's a lot of my life to invest in a program and be unsuccessful." However, he is gamely trying to forget and concentrate on winning the next big project: the $700 million Light Airborne Multi-Purpose System (LAMPS) helicopter contract to be awarded by the Navy this spring. Vertol managers claim they have solved the vibration problems that plagued their UTTAS models, and so have high hopes...
Anxiety too. Says Union Leader McHugh: "I don't see a way for the company to stay open without LAMPS." President Stuverude, noting that Vertol has diversified into making railroad cars, scoffs at such talk as "a bunch of conjecture." Besides, he says firmly, "we are going to win LAMPS." Maybe-but the design will be based on UTTAS, and the main competitor once again is Sikorsky...