Addressing the graduating class of the U.S. Air Force Academy last week, President Kennedy dropped into his speech a new section that had not been in the text issued the day before. Said the President: "I'm announcing today that the United States will commit itself to develop a commercially successful supersonic transport superior to that being built in any other country in the world."
Advised by Lindbergh. Though a presidential decision on the SST had been expected, Kennedy's timing was obviously triggered by what he called "competition from across the Atlantic." Only the day before, Pan American World Airways' crafty President Juan Trippe, 63, announced that he had ordered six supersonic Concordes from a government-sponsored Anglo-French consortium. The needle-nosed Concordes will fly at Mach 2.2 (or 2.2 times the speed of sound), are expected to enter commercial service in 1968. (Trippe went after the Concorde at the urging of Pan Am's distinguished aviation consultant, Charles A. Lindbergh.)
Kennedy was vague on details about the U.S. supersonic project, but what he did say sounded encouraging to U.S. industry leaders. He called for an open competition among U.S. airframe and engine makers to design an SST that would fly at "the end of the '60s at a speed faster than Mach 2." Kennedy is expected to ask Congress this summer for a supplemental appropriation of $100 million or more to get the program started at once. The total development costs for an SST may run as high as $2 billion, most of which will be advanced by the Government.
Lost Chances. By dragging its feet for more than two years, the Administration has already lost any chance of putting a U.S. supersonic into commercial service before the Concorde. Even to put a supersonic into service by 1970, the U.S. must gear up a crash program -and crash programs are notoriously costly and inefficient. The irony of the U.S.'s lag is that if Eisenhower and Kennedy had not clipped the B70 supersonic bomber program, the U.S. would be far in front in the supersonic race, could have adapted a commercial jetliner from the military prototype.
But the new U.S. effort received an unintentional boost from the Concorde consortium, which has set up a cozy delivery plan under which only Air France, BO AC and Pan Am will receive the first 18 planes. Since production of the 18 will probably run well into 1969. the U.S. may be able to deliver its SST to the rest of the world's airlines almost as soon as the consortium can, thus capture a good part of the market and hopefully help to repay a big part of the Government's costs.