With Support Eroding, Aircraft Firms Wing It : Industry: U.S. aviation builders’ world leadership is slipping. At fault may be emphasis on space program.

When Boeing Co. needed a wind tunnel recently to test the design of its new 777 passenger jet, the company sent its top-secret airplane model to a research facility operated by the Royal Aerospace Establishment in Britain.

The nation’s premier aircraft builder was forced abroad because the National Aeronautics and Space Administration had shut down the decrepit wind tunnel in Sunnyvale, about 40 miles south of San Francisco, that the company would otherwise have used. For 20 years, the pressurized tunnel had been cracking, finally prompting concerns that it might blow apart and injure somebody.

The deterioration of the NASA wind tunnel is symptomatic of a decay in U.S. government support for the aircraft industry, whose world leadership is being challenged across a broad front as never before, according to top private and government experts.

“There is an aeronautics competitiveness crisis in this country,” said Brad Biegon, director of aeronautics policy at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the leading technical society in aerospace. “There is no advocacy for this industry, even though it employs 700,000 in commercial aircraft alone.”

In the public mind, NASA is the “space agency”--certainly not the government’s focal point for aeronautics technology, as it is supposed to be, much less an advocate for the industry’s welfare. Rather, NASA is the outfit that sends astronauts into space, takes flashy pictures of Saturn and gets credit for fostering the microelectronics revolution.

The aeronautics community--the airplane and helicopter world--believes it has secondary citizenship in NASA; aeronautics, it says resignedly, is the small a in the agency. Ironically, aircraft--not NASA’s spacecraft--are the paying part of aerospace, earning the nation a $22-billion trade surplus this year.

But as European and Asian nations intensify their push into the commercial aircraft business, industry and outside experts say that bolstering the U.S. industry must climb higher on the national agenda. One critical question: Will the United States take a dominant role in building a supersonic passenger jet early in the next century?

The industry stops well short of asking the government to manage its affairs or provide subsidies, the way foreign governments do. Instead, U.S. firms are clamoring for a focused U.S. government effort to maintain the nation’s aerospace leadership.

But that runs smack into an ideological debate over national industrial policy--the kind of concerted government involvement in private industry that the Bush Administration completely disavows.

“We are losing our preeminence in aeronautics, and we have to stop that slide,” said Rep. George E. Brown Jr. (D-Colton), chairman of the House Space, Science and Technology Committee, the panel that sets the NASA budget. “We ought to have the world’s best wind tunnels, provide (special) interest rates to the industry on its borrowings, make sure we have enough skilled workers.”

The best evidence that the industry is in trouble may be the slippage in the U.S. share of the aerospace market. At a 60% share, the U.S. grip on world commercial and military aerospace sales is still formidable. But it is eroding rapidly--the United States sold 79% of the world’s aerospace products in 1970 and 73% as recently as 1985.

No reversal of that decline is in sight. Indeed, concern was sharply elevated when McDonnell Douglas announced last month that it would sell a 40% stake in its commercial aircraft business to a Taiwanese group.

Unlike most manufacturing sectors--such as automobiles, steel and electronics--the U.S. government has always provided research programs, laboratories and research facilities for aerospace--thanks to the public love affair with flight and the military’s interest in air warfare.

Government support has been a cornerstone of U.S. dominance, experts agree, accounting for countless small technological advances that collectively have made U.S. aircraft the best.

But as foreign rivals have stoked their research efforts in aerodynamics, jet engines, advanced plastic materials and avionics in recent decades, U.S. government support for aerospace has remained flat.

NASA is spending $969.6 million for aeronautics research in the current fiscal year, representing 6% of its total budget, according to Cecil Rosen III, NASA’s director for aeronautics.

The other 94% of NASA’s budget is allocated to space activities--an imbalance that many experts regard as absurd, given the economic importance of aircraft exports and jobs. Critics worry that the U.S. aerospace industry will go down the drain before NASA goes to Mars, one of the agency’s coveted goals.

But big space programs have long been the nation’s consummate public works projects, easily attracting congressional support.

Still, even NASA officials say the time has come to put greater emphasis on aircraft.

Although NASA seems now to be putting greater emphasis on aeronautics, the industry has had to grapple with the agency’s neglect of key facilities and a reduction in the number of aircraft research programs.

“There certainly was a time when there was no question that the best wind tunnels in the world were in the United States, and they were operated by NASA,” said Phil Condit, executive vice president of Boeing’s Commercial Airplane Group in Seattle. “That is clearly not true today.”

Some important segments of the industry--including the general aviation industry, which leads the world in the production of business jets--say they are all but ignored by NASA.

“We get very, very little help from NASA, but we are hopeful that may turn around,” said James D. Gormley, president of the General Aviation Manufacturers Assn. The industry’s production has plummeted from 17,000 airplanes in 1978 to 1,144 airplanes in 1990, the consequence of a crisis in product liability litigation and the earlier impact of fuel costs.

“We are lucky to be alive,” he said.

Now, even NASA’s Richard Petersen, associate administrator for aeronautics and space technology, acknowledges the U.S. industry could be in trouble if measures are not taken to reverse the decline.

The agency is trying to improve its support of aeronautics, though aircraft research is “competing for the budget at a time when money is tight,” Petersen said.

NASA is spending $342 million over a five-year period to rebuild the wind tunnels at its three key research centers, including replacement of the cracked wind tunnel at Ames Research Center in Sunnyvale. But critics assert that the agency and Congress waited too long.

“It keeps us even, but it doesn’t advance us much into the future,” laments James Green, a staff member of the House space committee. “When you talk wind tunnels, there are not many votes for that. It is not a sexy issue.”

Even NASA’s best research facilities are sometimes inadequate to meet the needs of the nation’s aeronautical researchers.

NASA’s Numerical Aerodynamic Simulation facility in Sunnyvale, which simulates how aircraft designs will perform in flight, is widely considered the best in the world. With two Cray supercomputers and banks of supporting processors, the complex cost $100 million and has an annual operating budget of $45 million, according to David Cooper, division chief for the operation.

Still, it received research proposals this year that would have required three times the facility’s number-crunching capacity, Cooper said.

The next step in “computational fluid dynamics” is to create computer models of an entire aircraft’s behavior as it interacts with its engines, wing flutter and control systems. The nation that can do this first will have an advantage in designing aircraft, but the capability will require more than a thousand-fold increase in computer speed.

If foreign aircraft firms get access to such capabilities from their supercomputer industries first, they will have a dramatic design advantage over U.S. firms, Cooper said. But so far, the Bush Administration is not doing anything to help the United States in the race for design superiority, which is sure to figure importantly in designing a supersonic passenger jet.

“We are facing a crisis,” Cooper said. “This country needs to look at not only some of the problems we face in subsonic aircraft, but also a high-speed transport. These types of aircraft will be flying shortly after 2000, and if they are not Boeing or McDonnell Douglas, then they will be Airbus (Industrie, the European aircraft consortium,) or carry a Japanese flag on them.”

While NASA is funding research into a supersonic transport, critics doubt that the effort is well focused or ambitious enough to assure U.S. leadership.

“We are sitting around fiddling while Rome burns,” said Don Fuqua, president of the Aerospace Industries Assn., a trade group. Such a focused effort would require more government involvement in setting national goals, funding industry research and relaxing antitrust laws that have blocked U.S. firms from joining forces the way European companies do, Fuqua said.

But the Bush Administration--particularly Office of Management and Budget Director Richard G. Darman and Vice President Dan Quayle’s space council--has resisted efforts to assist the industry, asserting that private industry should succeed or fail on its own.

In addition, top Air Force officials recently blocked an effort to restore a White House advisory council on aeronautics policy over concern that its agenda would be contrary to the service’s, according to knowledgeable sources.

U.S. aircraft producers say that Airbus has received $26 billion in research and production subsidies from European governments, an assertion that Airbus dismisses. Alan S. Boyd, chairman of the firm’s North America office, said Airbus is now repaying $11 billion in past loans and no longer receives any government assistance.

Rather, the European Community alleged this month that the U.S. commercial aircraft industry has received as much as $41.5 billion in government support since 1976, much in the form of Pentagon contracts. The U.S. industry, in turn, dismisses that allegation as totally without merit.

Indeed, from the U.S. industry’s perspective, the Pentagon actually campaigned against it during the late 1980s by saddling the industry with multibillion-dollar losses on fixed-price contracts. Those losses weakened the industry at the time competitors were gaining strength with government subsidies. The A-12 attack jet, the C-17 cargo jet and the advanced tactical fighter programs alone accounted for more than $3 billion in industry losses.

Fixed-price contracting policies now have been disavowed. By contrast, the Air Force these days is trying to maintain research funding for the industry, even as its own budget comes under heavy pressure.

The Air Force’s Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio--the world’s largest aircraft development center--spent $997 million on basic aeronautical research in fiscal 1991, according to Col. Richard R. Paul, the lab’s commander. Although defense spending has been slipping since 1986, the Wright lab budget has been constant, even after adjusting for inflation.

In budgets for the next few years, “my guess is that we are going to see (only) a small decrease,” Paul said. “It is a recognition by the Air Force that even though we are not in an era of building many new weapon systems, the technology base is vital to our future.”

Although much of the lab’s work is specific to weaponry, the aircraft industry obtains plenty of generic technology.

For instance, the lab’s work on high-performance turbine-engine technology, involving new materials and shapes for turbine parts, was directly transferred into the Pratt & Whitney jets now used on the Boeing 757, Paul said. The government cost for that program is about $150 million annually.

The lab, meanwhile, continues to increase its commercial technology assistance to U.S. industry, a policy mandated by the Technology Transfer Act of 1986.

Paul rejects dire assessments that the military aerospace industry is in a crisis. “I don’t sense at all that we are losing leadership in aeronautics technology,” he says. “Whether it is engines, avionics or aerodynamics, we are holding our own.” Indeed, the Persian Gulf War demonstrated the prowess of U.S. military technology.

Even without massive increases in aeronautical research funding, the U.S. could improve its competitiveness through better collaboration between NASA, the military services, industry and major universities, said John Cashen, one of the key designers of Northrop Corp.’s B-2 bomber. A more coordinated effort to build experimental aircraft would get technology out of government labs faster and help maintain industry’s skills at a time when fewer new aircraft are being designed, he said.

The Pentagon is trying to improve its coordination by establishing a panel composed of the military services’ technology chiefs to set research agendas, according to Maj. Gen. Robert R. Rankine Jr., a top Air Force technology chief.

Nonetheless, experts in Congress sense that more dramatic action is needed.

The U.S. share of the passenger-jet market has dropped alarmingly, they note. Airbus accounted for 28% of commercial aircraft orders in the first 10 months of 1991, vs. 19% just four years ago.

While Boeing, with 58% of the year’s orders, is holding up well, McDonnell--with only 10%--has slipped badly. Since 1970, Boeing has accounted for 56% of the 6,047 aircraft sold, meaning its share this year is a bit above average. But McDonnell is down from its average 19% share. And Lockheed Corp., which accounted for another 2% of sales, is no longer in the business.

“The trend is not particularly comforting,” acknowledged Keith Richey, chief scientist at Wright lab and a career aircraft technologist. “The Europeans are getting very strong in aeronautics.”

It doesn’t help the industry that NASA’s budget is funded by the House appropriations subcommittee that also oversees housing and veterans affairs. As things work in Congress, the NASA budget must come out of a pool that serves those social programs, Brown said, setting up essentially empty trade-offs between a space station and urban housing, for example.

The nation’s leadership often manages the government’s aerospace activities with odd political agendas, disregarding the importance of its actions for the nation’s competitiveness.

Earlier this year, for example, members of the House appropriations subcommittee zeroed NASA funding for the National Aerospace Plane, a hypersonic experimental craft that is considered a vital research program.

The sudden action was retribution for the House Science Committee reversing an appropriations subcommittee effort to cut space station funding, said Rep. Tom Lewis, (R-Fla.), a Science Committee member.