Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
senators, Warren Magnuson and Henry “Scoop” Jackson, lent their strong
support. Meanwhile, the Anglo-French Concorde and the Russian TU-144
seemed likely to hit production by the early 1970s. Proponents of the SST
reiterated time and again that if Americans did not build supersonic air-
crafts, then they would wind up buying them. 4
In addition to Boeing's design problems, however, the SST had serious
nontechnical issues, and in the delay caused by the wing flaw these issues
came to light. First and foremost, the economics of the SST were at best
questionable. As Swedish aviation consultant Bo Lundberg wrote in a 1965
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists article (and later testified to Congress), while
the SST might create a few jobs for highly skilled workers already in high
demand, the project held little promise of bolstering the U.S. economy. 5
The SST might not even break even. Lundberg predicted that the Con-
corde, the model for the American SST, at the projected cost of $46 million
per plane and between three and four times the fuel consumption per seat
mile of a standard subsonic jet, would serve an “appallingly small” market.
In the end, he predicted, the Concorde would lose money for its British and
French sponsors. (It did.) 6 As Defense Secretary Robert McNamara con-
firmed in an internal White House study shortly after Lundberg's article
came out, the American SST might fare even worse. 7 By 1967, buying the
French model instead of building an American one for a loss did not look
so bad.
Perhaps more important, as opposition to the SST mounted, the fight
against the plane began to represent a larger challenge to the mind-set that
had made the SST a possibility in the first place. 8 Though perhaps not as
obvious or abrupt as the gap in the Keeling Curve, at some point in the
mid-1960s a rift began to develop between the technological optimism of
the Kennedy years and the skepticism characteristic of the tumultuous
final years of the decade. By the time the SST was defeated in 1971, Demo-
cratic senators cited the plane as a “symbolic issue in the struggle over new
priorities and directions for the nation.” 9 Much of the impetus for this
struggle for new directions came from profound doubts about the integrity
of government and the role of an overly powerful technology sector tied
directly to America's controversial military engagements. In the case of the
SST, opposition that began as an economic argument against irresponsible
aerospace spending came to fruition as growing concern for the quality of
America's natural and human environments.
Search WWH ::




Custom Search