Flxible Metro

South Shore Center while testing with AC Transit, September 1976 Under the ownership of Rohr Industries since 1970, while their very popular Flxible New Look was still in production, Rohr began development of what would become the Grumman 870 Advanced Design Bus. The Grumman 870 bus was one of two advanced-design buses (the other being the Rapid Transit Series (RTS II) developed by rival General Motors and later taken by MTS). Both models were compromises by the Urban Mass Transit Administration (UMTA), which sought to develop a "Transbus" design that would be "attractive, roomy, comfortable", and easier for elderly and disabled customers to board, accepting these two models as compromises. At the time, the federal government would subsidize the purchase of only the 870 or the RTS II. In 1978, Rohr sold Flxible to Grumman for US$55 million, with the sale including the sale of two prototypes of what would become the 870. In spite of the fact that the second prototype failed testing as the result of a cracked "A" frame, and with an endurance test not yet performed, Grumman decided that the 870 was ready for production, and discontinued the Flxible New Look almost as soon as the purchase closed (more in "Litigation resulting" below). The first 870 rolled off the assembly line in spring 1978. Eventually, Grumman was forced to sell the line to General Automotive Corporation in 1983 for $41 million, a 25-percent loss after developing what by this time had become known as the "Flxible Metro", which addressed all of the shortcomings of the Model 870 in 1982. Under the ownership of General Automotive, the Flxible nameplate was restored to the buses. was one of the last agencies operating Flxible Metro buses past 2010. Production continued until late 1995, when financial problems prompted the company to suspend production and lay off most of its workforce at the Delaware, Ohio, factory. The layoffs were initially planned to be temporary, but ultimately became permanent, The last Flxible Metros delivered were ones delivered in November 1995 to Monterey-Salinas Transit (Monterey, California), and the Baltimore Metropolitan Transit Authority (Baltimore, Maryland). However, neither of these orders included the Metro with the highest serial number (106591), which had been delivered the previous month to Columbus, Ohio. ==Litigation resulting==

The Grumman era of production would result in a number of lawsuits related to defects in the A-frame of the 870, involving either Flxible's former owner Rohr or the Metropolitan Transportation Authority of New York. • The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), in whose buses where the first cracked A-frame problem was noticed in early December 1980 at their Ulmer Park Depot, yanked its NYC Transit Authority fleet for the first time in 1980 (a separate batch for MSBA was built with the problem rectified the next year) and sued Grumman. This lawsuit would result in a settlement to fix all 870 buses built until that time (2,656 examples in all), along with an early termination of the build contract where the final 200 buses of the order were transferred to General Motors. This time, Grumman would countersue the MTA for $1 billion, claiming that poor maintenance was the cause, and took out full-page advertisements in local media attesting to this fact. The MTA would end up paying $56 million back to the Urban Mass Transit Administration for refusing to run the buses. The buses would sit for nearly two years at the Brooklyn Army Terminal until late 1985, when UMTA exchanged the payment for equity in MTA properties, allowing for 835 of the 851 buses to be sold. 620 of the buses were rebuilt and sold to New Jersey Transit, 175 of these buses were also rebuilt and sold to the Queen City Metro of Cincinnati, Ohio, with the remaining 40 buses rebuilt and sold to a transit agency in Puerto Rico. The 16 unsold buses were held for evidence until the lawsuit was resolved; one bus (236) was preserved, 13 were sold to the Pioneer Valley Transportation Authority of Springfield, Massachusetts in early 1985, and the remaining two were scrapped. ==Model history==

The model history of the Grumman 870/Flxible Metro is as follows: ==See also==