For four years, the fates of two companies, their workers and their communities hung on a single Army contract for a helicopter known as UTTAS (Utility Tactical Transport Aircraft System). In December the Army announced the winner: Sikorsky of Stratford, Conn., which stands to reap perhaps $4 billion in sales over the next ten years. The loser, Boeing Vertol in Ridley Township, Pa., a suburb of Philadelphia, must now contend with doubts about its survival as a primary aircraft maker. To gauge the impact of the biggest helicopter award in 20 years, TIME Correspondent Eileen Shields visited both plants. Her report:
Sikorsky's slogan was UTTAS HAS A U IN IT; Boeing Vertol's was WIN WITH UTTAS. Since March 1972, when the competition for the assault helicopter began, these phrases have turned up on bumper stickers, plant posters, windows of local bars and gas stations, and T shirts. The boosterism was understandable: both companies needed UTTAS desperately. As divisions of larger concerns —Sikorsky of United Technologies Corp., Vertol of Boeing Co.—neither publishes separate sales and profit figures, but it is scarcely any secret that both have been hurt badly by declining military orders for helicopters since the Viet Nam War was at its height.
In 1969 Vertol employed 13,900 people to make 30 helicopters a month; by last year employment had sunk to 5,500 and production to two aircraft a month. Sikorsky's employment plunged from 11,000 to 6,200 in the same period, and its plant in 1976 was working at only 22% of capacity; for the first time since it started manufacturing helicopters 37 years ago, the company did not have a single Government contract. As the companies' fortunes declined, so did those of the decaying industrial river valleys in which they are camped. Unemployment hovers at about 12% around the Vertol plant in the Delaware Valley, and 10% in Sikorsky's Housatonic Valley.
So tension ran high on Dec. 23, the date for the award. At both plants it was the last day of work before a ten-day vacation, and the scenes began identically: as noon approached, workers began preparing for annual lunch-in parties (no liquor, but lots of special things to eat). A few minutes after 12, the grapevines came alive with news of Sikorsky's victory.
At Vertol, workers heard their president's shaken voice over the p. a. system: "This is Howard Stuverude speaking. I am extremely disappointed that we were not selected." Over a din of boos and hisses, one worker who felt that "disappointed" was too weak a description for his feelings, jeered, "Peanuts!" Recalls Union Leader Robert McHugh: "Instead of a Christmas celebration, it was more like a wake." Not so 150 miles north, in Stratford. Sikorsky President Gerald Tobias raced out of his office and hopped on an electric golf cart to tour the plant, shouting the news to machinists, assemblers and engineers. Says Riveter Maria Ferreira, 54: "It was like the war ended. Everyone went crazy, clapping, screaming, yelling."