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The company, which recently dropped its lease on one major assembly plant and turned two others into storage space, sees little chance to grow rapidly. The cancellation of the SST, which company designers labored on for more than a decade, casts a new pall over its future. The loss of the SST was a painful psychological blow as well as an economic setback. For the first time since the advent of jet travel, Boeing was deprived of work on "the big new plane" that the rest of the world would soon be discussing. The cancellation also meant the partial breakup of the company's supersonic engineering and design teams, not to mention its hopes for hundreds of millions in profits if the craft proved airworthy. Said a Boeing spokesman: "We wanted the SST badly—because it's the future."
Another of the aerospace majors, North American Rockwell, which produces an extensive mix of automotive and electronic products, has weathered the storm in aerospace fairly well. It h: s high hopes of getting substantial future contracts for the B-l bomber and NASA's space shuttle system. Last year's sales fell 9.6% to $2.4 billion, but earnings were stable at $64.7 million.
The current king of the hill in aerospace is McDonnell Douglas, which is on schedule with its DC-10 Trijet program and the lucrative F-15 military jet fighter contract. The company's astronautics division is hard at work on projects including NASA's skylab program and the Army's Spartan missile for the anti-ballistic missile system. The
F-4 Phantom jet has become a workhorse of the Viet Nam War. More than 4.000 of them have been produced so far, and the McDonnell Douglas executives optimistically expect the total to reach 5,000 before the planes become obsolescent. That hope may well come true, especially since the West German government announced last week that it plans to shift away from the accident-plagued Lockheed Starfighter and buy $1 billion worth of Phantoms.
The most distressing result of the industry's current misfortunes is the hardship borne by its laid-off workers. Many of the men and women who stopped working on the hornet-nosed SST prototype at Boeing last week had long service in the company. "I've been working on this plane for five years, and what really disappoints me is that I'll never get to see it fly," said one. "You really get attached to them."
There is now some question whether the U.S. can maintain its dominance of worldwide aerospace sales. Of about 10,000 commercial aircraft flying in the West, 85% were built in the U.S. The aerospace industry is the nation's No. 1 exporter of manufactured goods; last year its sales to foreign buyers amounted to $3.4 billion. If the U.S. loses the lead in aerospace, its balance-of-payments deficit (already running to $5 billion annually) could worsen considerably. Says Richard Marshall, vice president of DMS Inc., a defense marketing research firm: "The Senate vote on the SST lost us what might have been our leading export item from 1975 to 1990."