AIR: What's In It For the U.S.?

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At the close of the last war I sat at international council tables representing our nation on vital matters affecting aeronautics. Yet my colleagues and I had been given only a few days . . . to prepare. And across the tables sat representatives of the Allies who had been preparing for months and even years. They were equipped with a program. . . .

Colonel Edgar Staley Gorrell, president of Air Transport Association of America, was testifying last week before a House committee. Like many another U.S. air executive he was not only looking back with regret, he was also looking ahead with foreboding. One day peace would come, and with it the vastest problem in world transportation that peacemakers had ever met. The world had to be opened to the airlines. How could it be done?

Dream Fulfilled. The day of world air transport is no longer a pipe dream. It is here. There is not a meridian on the earth's fat face that freighters and passenger aircraft do not cross. There are few latitudes where they do not operate, none where they cannot. Yet the day of air transport is only dawning. New aircraft with vastly increased loads and ranges (up to 10,000 miles) are all but ready to fly. Behind them, far past the planning stage, are larger craft still. And following them are new technologies that will increase ranges and loads again.

One of the rubs in the problem is that most of these improvements are the developments and properties of the U.S. Driven by war's necessities, the U.S. has developed its passion for big aircraft (beginning with bombers) beyond airmen's most purple dreams. Cast by war as operator of its longest supply routes, the U.S. has literally been driven into the world transport business.

So when crop-haired, electric Major General Harold Lee George of the U.S. Army looks at his Air Transport Command, it is the whole world he sees. At some of his bases camels lug in the fuel for U.S. transports; at others, sledge dogs; at others, Chinese coolies or Untouchables. Seeing what he sees, he can and does say that "to place any limitations on air transport at all would be to deny progress."

Fulfillment Deferred? But to implement that progress, the need now is not for soldiers but for statesmen. Though the U.S. has the equipment and the experience no other country has, it is still poor in the pivotal bases on which world air transport depends. Those bases belong to U.S. allies —Britain, Russia and China. Unless U.S. statesmen can wangle the rights to their use, the U.S. will be left at the post. That is why airmen say that now is the time to face the situation.

Aircraft's increasing ranges have changed the old concept of world air trade out of all knowledge. Most of the world's worthwhile trade territory, except for South America, lies in the Northern Hemisphere. The shortest way to points in that hemisphere is by Great Circle routes. All these routes go over the top of the world (see map), where airmen have already demonstrated they can fly.