BUSINESS ABROAD: Brochuremanship in Britain

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¶ The Gloster Javelin, first projected in the late 19405 as a delta-wing, all-weather fighter, was so full of troubles that it will only come into general service next spring.

But the fourth crash of a Javelin, last week, will probably put back the timetable once more.

"Fly British." On the transport side, Britain has spent upwards of $70 million on a lost fleet since 1941. At first, planemakers laid their plans around huge flying boats ideal for empire routes, where long runways and well-equipped airfields were few and far between, ordered four models, including a gigantic, ten-engined Saunders-Roe Princess flying boat at a cost of some $22 million. As it turned out, big airfields were built in virtually every corner of the world during World War II, thus making Great Britain's flying boats obsolete.

The Comet disasters cost Britain upwards of $30 million. Another plane—the Bristol Brabazon—was designed to carry 100 passengers nonstop across the Atlantic, but it turned into a Rube Goldberg nightmare. Four other big airliners—the Armstrong Whitworth Apollo turboprop, the Handley Page Hermes, the Avro Tudor and the $6.4 million Vickers 1000—also had little success and were scrapped.

Viscounts & Growth. Britain has had some successes. The Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire jet engine is'so good that Curtiss-Wright makes it in the U.S. under license.

The new Rolls-Royce Conway by-pass jet engine, in which part of the air is passed around the combustion chambers directly into the tail cone, thus producing greater, more economical thrust, is highly praised by U.S. engineers. The Vickers Viscount airliner now flying on U.S. air routes has done so well that some 240 have been sold. Vickers is currently working on a bigger model called the Vanguard.

BOAC hopes to put the Bristol Britannia, a four-engined turboprop, in service across the Atlantic by 1957, fly the ocean nonstop at 400 m.p.h.

With limited resources, British planemakers are finally learning that they cannot compete all along the line with a variety of different designs, must concentrate on fewer types of planes, spend more on development and research. Says Supply Minister Reginald Maudling, currently on a tour of the U.S. and Canada, studying weapons research and procurement systems: "The British aviation industry will concentrate on developing its known successes. There seems to me to be a lot of room for the aircraft industries of both countries if we proceed in friendly rivalry."