Delay on jet parts unlikely

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32450, 10 November 1970, Page 2

Delay on jet parts unlikely

(N.Z. Press Association) AUCKLAND, Nov. 9. The first consignment of New Zealand-made spare parts for Boeing aircraft should be ready for dispatch by air to the United States by February 12.

Boeing announced last week that four New Zealand organisations had won the contracts to make the spare parts. They are National Airways Corporation, Air Parts (New Zealand), Ltd, of Hamilton, H. J. Ryan, Ltd, of Auckland, and Aeroengine Services, Ltd, of Hamilton.

The New Zealand Overseas Trading Corporation negotiated the contracts for the three companies. Mr R. M. Simmonds, the manager of the engineering division of N.A.C., said today that the contracts were to be renewable at six-month intervals. It was hoped that this programme would be extended.

However, any positive agreement on the extension of the contract into a wider industrial field would be withheld until the first locally made parts had been seen in the United States. The New Zealand contractors had to be competitive with American industry but

not with each other. Each of the firms had been given different production runs. Techniques, rather than existing facilities, would have to be changed at this stage, said Mr Simmonds, referring to reorganisation within the contractors’ factories. “It is very much a pilot scheme,” he said.