Word: willowes
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...Boxcars it has delivered, will be permitted to finish eleven more C-119's with parts ready for assembly. On top of what it had paid for the planes, the Air Force had poured $30 million into tooling up for C-123's at Willow Run and committed $40 million more to Chase Aircraft for design and engineering (Kaiser still has subcontracts for plane parts). Whether Kaiser could keep Willow Run going was anybody's guess. There was talk that the plant might start producing parts for Willys Motors (which Kaiser bought for $62 million two months...
Armed with stacks of statistics, Henry Kaiser and son Edgar appeared before a Senate subcommittee last week to defend their performance in making airplanes at Willow Run. But in the midst of the defense, an aide passed them a note containing some startling news: Air Force Secretary Harold Talbott had just canceled Kaiser's orders for C-119 Flying Boxcars, along with $225 million in orders for 244 assault transports from Chase Aircraft, 49% Kaiser owned. On that note, the hearing abruptly ended...
Next day, the Kaisers laid off 9,000 of their 12,200 workers at Willow Run, where the C-119 Boxcars were made on license from Fairchild Engine & Aircraft, their original designer. Auto production (250 cars a day) had already been halted in the plant a few days earlier, when a strike at Borg-Warner shut off K-F's supply of automatic transmissions and forced a layoff 'of 2,200 men. At week's end, there were only 1,000 K-F workers left, finishing up the last Boxcars and making auto parts for other manufacturers...
...forerunners of the C-119's) and some 400 Boxcars. It was also unfair to compare costs between the two planemakers. said Kaiser, because the C-119 made by Fairchild is not as difficult to build as the modified C-119 being made at Willow...
There were also some questionable "shop practices," said Solomon, such as the Willow Run workers' habit of making "manual changes" in time cards to show credit for time not actually worked. Vermont's Senator Ralph Flanders, who drops his Rs in New England fashion, asked to have "shop practices" spelled. Explained he: "There are differences in pronunciation in different parts of the country...