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It is possible that the SST will rise again, if some future Congress decides that it is an economic or political necessity. Congress may well be forced to such a decision by international competition in the supersonic field. Two competitive planes, the Anglo-French Concorde and the Soviet TU-144, have been undergoing test flights for more than a year. Although British and French officials are still debating whether to continue bankrolling the Concorde, it is scheduled to begin commercial service in 1974. The Soviet TU-144 may make a dramatic appearance at the European Air Show this May and is due to start carrying passengers in about three years.
That raises the possibility that U.S. airlines might have to buy new equipment from abroad. "None of us would want to watch the Tupolevs go by," says Najeeb Halaby, chairman of Pan Am. Nor would Western airmen want to be dependent on the Soviets for spare parts. Eager for high prestige and hard currency, the Russians are making a determined effort to sell their TU-144, as well as many other planes, to airlines in the non-Communist world.
For the time being, many airline executives would like to see all the supersonics abandoned, or delayed for some years. The airlines are stretching out orders on all previously ordered equipment, including the new tri-jet airbuses that will go into service this fall. The reason: the lines are short of capital and are having a hard enough time filling their existing fleets.-
Focus of Resistance
From its inception as a largely Government-funded experiment in 1963, America's SST has drawn critical fire. No less a Jovian figure than Charles Lindbergh publicly questioned its advisability, and scientists were debating its possible faults right up to the moment of the vote. Although some of the rhetoric was wrapped in unconscionably scary language, there were at least two reasonable grounds on which to question the plane's viability. Ecologically, the SST would have been a noise polluter unless equipped with extra gear that would severely reduce its payload. Economically, it could have been an aerial Edsel. The plane's astronomical price tag (at least $40 million each v. $28 million for the less advanced Concorde) left doubts that enough buyers could be found to recapture the $1.3 billion necessary to build a prototype.
The SST became the focus of the rising public resistance against products that might harm the environment and against the expenditure of vast sums to bankroll "progress" that could be enjoyed only by the well off. Consumer activists have attacked products of industries as varied as autos and food. Yet no industry has been affected quite so dramatically as aerospace.