Boeing Knew of Missile Flaw in ‘83, Paper Says : Defense: The firm reportedly sold cruise weapons to the government despite a guidance system malfunction.

The Boeing Co. continued to sell cruise missiles to the government in the 1980s even though it knew that the weapon’s guidance system malfunctioned in extreme cold, a newspaper reported today.

Boeing knew of the flaw in 1983 but decided not to fix about 1,000 of the nuclear-tipped weapons already delivered to the Air Force, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer said.

And Boeing sold about 700 more of the missiles to the government despite mounting evidence that the weapon’s guidance system failed at extreme low temperatures, the newspaper said, citing company documents.

Seattle-based Boeing ultimately built 1,715 cruise missiles for the government from 1981 to 1986 for $1.8 billion. The missile is designed to be launched from a B-52 bomber and drop to its target using information relayed by a gyroscope-controlled flight data transmitter. Air Force and industry experts say that a transmitter failure would send the weapon off course, causing it to crash.

Boeing has said it did not learn about the missile’s guidance-system problems until mid-1987, after the Justice Department began a criminal investigation of Northrop Corp., the subcontractor that assembled the flight data transmitter’s gyroscope package. Boeing spokesman Milt Furness repeated that assertion Friday.

Los Angeles-based Northrop pleaded guilty in February to 34 counts of fraudulent testing of the cruise and the Marine Corps Harrier jet and paid $17 million in fines and penalties. Boeing was not named in the investigation.

U.S. Atty. William Fahey of the Justice Department’s Los Angeles office said the investigation into fraudulent testing of the cruise guidance system remains open, although Northrop is no longer involved. Fahey declined to say whether Boeing is under investigation.

Boeing spokesman Furness said the company does not know of any federal investigation of its handling of the cruise-missile program.

Documents, which include confidential Boeing and Northrop test reports, show that Boeing engineers wrestled with cold-temperature failures as early as 1983, the newspaper said.

According to the documents:

* Boeing tested flight data transmitters (FDTs) from three missiles in October, 1983, after they failed under extreme cold conditions at Strategic Air Command bases in New York and Michigan. “Special testing has shown that all three FDTs are temperature-sensitive and will fail . . . at lower temperatures,” Boeing engineers concluded.

Despite seven cold-temperature failures of the guidance system, Boeing’s cruise-missile contract manager, Allen C. Raines, told the Air Force in a letter the following month that the company’s investigation was closed. Boeing called the number of failures “very low” and concluded that it was not necessary “to retrofit the fleet.”

* In the same period, according to internal Northrop reports, Boeing was repeatedly sending back cruise-missile flight data transmitters that were failing.