Transport: Cadman Castigation

John, Baron Cadman of Silverdale is a traveled, reserved, clean-shaven Staffordshire native, 61 years old, who walks from two to five miles for a breakfast appetizer, speaks phonograph-taught French. As plain John Cadman, he devoted his life to coal, gas and oil, spent twelve years' professorship of mining and petroleum technology at Birmingham University before he became head of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. Ltd. and was raised to the peerage. When a British M.P. last year accused the Government-backed Imperial Airways of being "the laughing stock of the world," Lord Cadman was named as a disinterested layman to head a committee of inquiry into all civil aviation.

From Dec. 1 to mid-February the committee held 30 meetings, heard 50 witnesses, devoted most of its time and most of its 85-page report to Imperial Airways Ltd. Excerpt: "There is not today a medium sized airliner of British construction comparable to the leading foreign types. Foreign manufacturers, American in particular, dominate the European market. . . . Management has been defective . . . intolerant of suggestion, unyielding in negotiation. Air services to the West Indies and across the Pacific are an uncontested monopoly of an American Company" [Pan American Airways].

So scathing was Cadman's castigation that the Government withheld the report, despite violent press criticism, until they had remedies to offer. Last week the Government offered the British public both. They proposed three new officials: a Permanent Under Secretary for Air (to link civil with military aviation); a Deputy Director General of Civil Aviation; a Director of Civil Research and Production (to bring British planes up to date). The Government also decided that British Airways and Imperial Airways, the chief Government-subsidized lines, should be completely reorganized. To make it easier to do all this—in spite of the fact that Imperial Airways last year paid 9% on its shares—the Government upped their yearly civil aviation subsidy to $15,000,000, twice the previous sum and 75% of the amount paid by the U. S. Post Office to airlines.