"Bendix made 75 percent of America's wartime avionics"

In circulation in the encyclopedic record of the present century · No source for the figure has been produced

The claim. "During the war Bendix manufactured about 75% of all avionics in US aircraft." The sentence circulates in the standard encyclopedic account of the Bendix Corporation and is reproduced from it in archival finding aids — the University of Alabama in Huntsville's Bendix collection guides carry the corporation's history in that form. In its home text, the companion sentence — that Bendix made "nearly every ancillary instrument or equipment for military aircraft" — is flagged by the encyclopedia's own editors as needing a citation. The percentage itself carries none.

The record. What the corporation said of itself at the time is large and unquantified. Bendix Aviation's annual report for the fiscal year ended 30 September 1942, reported in the press of March 1943, puts the company's war production at twenty times its prewar volume, about a third of the increase in device types not on the market in 1938, and "more than 150 devices manufactured by Bendix" needed to equip a single modern bomber. No percentage of the nation's avionics appears. No production census reached computes the share either; the Exports file examined the claim and declined to print it, and the wartime record documents Bendix's South Bend divisions — Stromberg carburetors among them — at great size without a fraction.

What the record leaves. The claim is not supported as stated: a precise figure with no source behind it in any record reached, where the company's own wartime accounting gives scale without percentages. The underlying fact — that Bendix's wartime aviation production was enormous, in South Bend and across its divisions — is documented at the annual-report level. The percentage is printed here so that its standing is on the record: an unsourced encyclopedic figure, carried forward by copying, which this history does not adopt.

Sources

1. The encyclopedic Bendix Corporation history as reproduced in the University of Alabama in Huntsville's Bendix Aviation Corporation and Bendix Corporation collection guides — "about 75% of all avionics in US aircraft"; the companion "nearly every ancillary instrument" sentence flagged "[citation needed]" in its home text.
2. Bendix Aviation Corporation annual report for fiscal 1942, as reported March 1943 — war production at twenty times prewar volume; "more than 150 devices manufactured by Bendix" to equip a modern bomber; no percentage stated.
3. The Exports file in this record — the claim examined and not printed; Bendix's wartime production documented without the fraction.