Aug 26 1980
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(New page: Press reports said that the U.S. Air Force wanted to spend about $1.4 billion to replace the wings of 81 "trouble-ridden C5A cargo transports." In 1965, Lockheed Corporation had decided to...)
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Press reports said that the U.S. Air Force wanted to spend about $1.4 billion to replace the wings of 81 "trouble-ridden C5A cargo transports." In 1965, Lockheed Corporation had decided to reduce the weight of C5A wings by 5 tons each, so as to underbid Boeing on a contract for building aircraft capable of carrying outsized loads. Robert B. Ormsby, Jr., president of Lockheed-Georgia, which built the planes, told a congressional hearing that the company's sole objective was to reduce wing weight to "the absolute minimum within the design requirements" and denied any company plan to replace the wings later when they should prove unsatisfactory. The 10,000-pound weight reduction apparently caused cracks in the aircraft calling for wing replacement: "Ormsby did not explain .why Lockheed did not know that the modification would reduce the effective life span of the wing from the 30,000 hours specified by the Air Force to an estimated 7,100 hours," the Washington Star noted.
Principal focus of the hearings was on whether the 30,000-hour service life presented by Lockheed and the U.S. Air Force as justification for the $1.4 billion wing-replacement program was really necessary. Sen. William Proxmire (D Wis.), chairman of the subcommittee on priorities and economy in government of the House-Senate Joint Economic Committee, said Lockheed's $2 billion cost overrun on the contract, discovered in 1968, was the largest in defense procurement history. He said the $1.16 billion Lockheed-Georgia would get for wing replacement would be "the biggest cost in history to correct a mistake." When Ormsby said that his firm would make a $140 million profit on the contract, Proxmire said "a lot of businessmen would love to make a mistake like that." The subcommittee heard David Keating, legislative director of the National Taxpayers Union (NTU), charge that such a profit would set up "a terrible incentive system." The message to defense contractors would be, "The more inefficient you are, the more profit you make. Build failures into the system and you'll be rewarded." Ormsby responded that, in terms of the critical need for the C5A in the nation's defense, the $1.4 billion was a "bargain" for taxpayers.
Paul C. Paris, director of the center for fracture mechanics at Washington University (St. Louis), said that the U.S. Air Force set up a Structural Information Enhancement Program (SIEP) after receiving a 3-volume report from Rand Corporation suggesting that C5As could serve under "present constraints on operational use" until the year 2000 without significant modification. The U.S. Air Force had put "severe restrictions on the C5A to prevent it from being flown in accord with its design specifications," Paris said, or it would have lasted "fewer than 3,000 flight hours"; it was "absolutely incredible" that a major aircraft producer would miss the fatigue life of a wing by a factor of more than 10. He said the SIEP assumed "since the [wing replacement] was going to be done, other less expensive options were not to be considered." (Paris was the only member of the SIEP steering committee not an employee of Lockheed or the U.S. Air Force.)
The Rand report recommended appointing a panel of independent specialists to assess the situation; Proxmire, Paris, and the NTU wanted the assessment done by the congressional Office of Technology Assessment. (W Star, Aug 26/80, A-8; W Post, Aug 26/80, A-8)
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