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For the plight of Douglas is the plight of the entire industry, despite its $20,000.000,000 annual business and its 2,000,000 employes. There is hardly an aircraft company which has enough cash reserves to meet its present payroll for more than a few weeks at the most, if contracts should be canceled. The eleven biggest manufacturers, the bulk of the industry, have only $138.000.000 in current assets over current liabilities—as compared to $650,000,000 for General Motors.
What will happen to the tremendous Douglas plant, the acres upon acres of machines, the 156,000 employes, when peace comes? A tiny part of this empire will be used to convert military to commercial transports. But for the rest, the Douglas answer, that "You shut the damn shop up," is inadequate. For the thousands who would thus become un employed—plus the rest of the industry's two million—might set a whole cycle of postwar depression in motion.
But already, to make sure that Douglas is not caught with its payrolls up when contracts go down, supple-fingered girls are riffling through the work cards, neatly tabbing them, ready for the torrential layoffs. The problem, Douglas feels, is not to keep the swollen aircraft industry operating at wartime levels, even if it were possible, but to get the millions of workers back into peacetime jobs.
In general, Douglas' attitude thus implies a deep pessimism toward aviation's future. But this pessimism is a curious blend of his financial caution and his own passionate preference for aircraft engineering, as against just making planes.
This pessimism is directed mainly at the immediate future. The question: What ceiling in the postwar sky? Donald Douglas would probably answer: Zero. But he would be thinking of the first few years, not of the Great Hereafter. He has a busy postwar planning department which concentrates on designs for new and better commercial transports.
But all this is small fry. All U.S. plane companies, thus busily spewing out planes, are thus industriously digging their own financial graves. By the end of this year 15,000 transport planes, many of them readily convertible to peacetime transports, will be in the air. This is some 30 times as many planes as were needed to handle prewar U.S. air travel. And bigger, better ones will be coming off the production lines shortly. No one knows how many commercial planes the postwar world can support. But can it be more than 30 times what it was? Thinking thus, many airplane makers are convinced that they can survive only if the Federal Government steps in and underwrites the industry until the glut of war planes is removed.
*"Arms—Quarterly; first and fourth, argent, a human heart ensigned by an imperial crown proper, on a chief azure three mullets argent; second and third, argent, a cross counter-embattled sable. Crest—a salamander in flames proper."—Debrett's.