Pentagon Woes Reach to the Top

Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger gained firsthand exposure Thursday to the troublesome issue of defective Pentagon machinery, and the lesson kept him sitting at the Brussels airport for 3 1/2 hours.

Weinberger, leaving a North Atlantic Treaty Organization meeting, boarded his Air Force jet at 7:45 a.m. for a flight to Maine and a weekend at his summer home. Under normal conditions, the military version of the Boeing 707 should have begun rolling toward the runway moments later.

But an electrical relay and a switch, connected to the plane’s flight instruments, were defective, and replacement parts could not be found and installed until 11:15 a.m..

“I want you to know that, with regard to this spare parts problem, we found it. We discovered it,” Weinberger said during a stroll through the airplane while awaiting the repair.

His crack was a tongue-in-cheek poke at the Pentagon’s well-used claim, when waste and overpricing of spare parts are uncovered and publicized, that its own vigilance is responsible for the discovery.

Although Weinberger remained grounded, Denmark’s delegation to the NATO meeting arrived at the airport, waved to the Americans sitting in their shiny blue, white and silver four-engine jet, carried their luggage aboard an aging, twin-engine propeller-driven airplane and departed.