Boro to Bendix

Ten years ago the name Teterboro was as familiar to the air-minded public as the word Newark is today. Across the tarmac and down the four runways of Teterboro Field, near little Hasbrouck Heights, N. J., the great and near-great flyers of the day paraded in ceaseless pageant. Bernt Balchen and Clarence Chamberlain based there; wild Bert Acosta cavorted in the sky; Charles Lindbergh was a frequent visitor; Giuseppe Bellanca there tested his new ships. Chief of Teterboro's prides was the No. 1 U. S. air plant of the period--Fokker--building not only most of the big commercial transports but such famed planes as the Josephine Ford which Admiral Byrd flew over the North Pole. Volatile, ambitious Tony Fokker wanted to make Teterboro the No. 1 U. S. airport. He might have succeeded had not Knute Rockne's death in a Fokker transport in 1931 banished Fokker planes from U. S. skies. With Fokker and his plant gone, Teterboro sank into obscurity and neglect. Lately it has had nothing to boast but its name. Last week even that went. By unanimous vote of 25 of its 26 registered voters (one did not show up), Teterboro's name was changed to Bendix in honor of the man who now proposes to restore it to its oldtime fame.

At 56, Vincent Bendix has risen from a Postal Telegraph messenger to head the $31,000,000 Bendix Aviation Corp., which makes at least one part of every U. S. automobile (starters, four-wheel brakes, air brakes, carburetors, air horns), also makes precision instruments of many kinds for airplanes. Last January when the epidemic of airplane crashes focused attention on radio beams, direction finders, loop antennae, etc., etc. (TIME, Jan. 25), Vincent Bendix decided to capitalize on it by amalgamating his radio interests into Bendix Radio Corp., biggest concern of its kind in the world. He bought 100 acres at Teterboro and took a three-year option on Teterboro Airport where he plans a $3,000,000 "aviation city" to manufacture present Bendix aviation products and develop new ones, such as blind landing systems, for which there is vital need. Some 500 men will soon start work on the site, 20 minutes from Manhattan across George Washington Bridge, constructing a factory, laboratory and foundry big enough for 2,500 workers. One device they will make when the plant is completed next winter and for which many airlines are eagerly waiting is Pan American Airway's famed Direction Finder system, the manufacturing rights to which cagey Vincent Bendix acquired last month. A complex mechanism by far the best of its kind in the world, it works from the ground, locates a plane precisely the instant the pilot asks his position. Its range: 1,800 mi.

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