## Facts

- A manufacturer entered a fixed-price contract with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to produce and deliver approximately 18,000,000 square feet of portable steel airplane landing mat (“M-8 mat”) for about $8.5 million.
- The mat design was new and intended to interlock into a continuous runway surface; drawings included dimensions and tolerances for corrugated steel sheets with slotted ends and an end-connector mechanism.
- The contractor read the drawings as inviting a “pierce-before-forming” sequence (piercing slots in flat steel before forming corrugations), and assumed that sequence could be used successfully.
- The government’s prototype work used press brakes, but the contract did not require any specific manufacturing method.
- To meet high-volume quotas economically, the contractor chose rolling machines for mass production using a pierce-before-forming approach.
- The rolling-machine process produced dimensional and quality problems relative to the specified tolerances; the contractor incurred additional costs from remedial operations and efforts to obtain tolerance relaxations.
- The contractor sought an equitable adjustment, asserting defective/misleading specifications and impossibility or commercial impracticability.
- The contracting officer denied the claim, and the Armed Services Board of Contract Appeals affirmed.
- In the Court of Claims, evidence included testimony that alternative methods (including expanded or modified press-brake operations) could produce conforming mats, though at higher cost.

## Issues

1. Whether the government’s design drawings misrepresented a feasible method of performance, breaching the implied warranty of adequate specifications and supporting an equitable adjustment.
2. Whether performance as specified was legally impossible or commercially impracticable under an objective standard.
3. Whether the Board’s determinations on specification interpretation and impossibility bound the court.

## Decision

- The court denied the contractor’s motion for judgment of liability and granted the government’s motion to dismiss.
- The court held the drawings did not misrepresent an impossible or commercially senseless method, even if they reasonably suggested pierce-before-forming.
- The contractor failed to prove objective impossibility or commercial impracticability because feasible alternative methods (notably press-brake production) existed.
- The court treated specification interpretation and impossibility as questions of law it could reexamine, and it agreed with the Board’s ultimate result.

## Legal Principles

- For government-furnished design specifications, the government may be responsible if the specifications require performance that is impossible or commercially senseless; the contractor must prove the defect caused the loss.
- Impossibility/commercial impracticability is objective: the contractor must show that compliance cannot be achieved by any feasible method, or that all feasible methods would be commercially unreasonable to the point of being senseless.
- Under a firm fixed-price contract, a contractor is not entitled to relief merely because it cannot achieve the productivity needed to preserve its expected profit; increased costs from the contractor’s chosen method and equipment are generally the contractor’s risk.
- Board fact findings may receive deference, but legal questions such as contract interpretation and impossibility are not binding on the court.

## Conclusion

The Court of Claims denied recovery because the contractor’s difficulties stemmed from its chosen production approach, not from specifications that were objectively impossible or commercially senseless to satisfy, and the record showed feasible alternative manufacturing methods remained available despite higher cost.


Natus Corp. v. United States, 371 F.2d 450 (Ct. Cl. 1967)