AVIATION: Help for the Feeders

"In some financial circles, the word airplane has become a dirty word." So says Mackey Airlines' President Joseph C. Mackey, and nowhere is the complaint louder than among the nation's 13 small feeder airlines, which cannot raise the money to buy the aircraft they need. Last week the feeders were in Washington, urging Congress to approve a pair of bills designed to help them out of their financing problems. One was a bill introduced by Oklahoma's Senator Mike Monroney that would give U.S. feeder airlines a Government guarantee on any loan from private sources; the other, in the House, would allow airline operators, like homeowners, to reinvest proceeds from the sale of old planes in new equipment without paying a capital-gains tax. Without such help, warned the Air Transport Association's President Stuart G. Tipton, one of the most promising of all U.S. industries will stay "stuck on dead center." Shoppers & Salesmen. The irony is that few industries can match the feeder lines' growth. Flying every kind of short-haul traveler from weekend shoppers to city-hopping salesmen, the lines carried 3,453,000 passengers last year (up from 25,000 in 1946) on 31,740 miles of routes in 44 states. Because of their growth, air traffic in many small U.S. cities now matches the volume of major cities abroad. Traffic at Fresno, Calif, (pop. 107,900) equals that of Frankfurt; traffic at Ontario, Calif, (pop. 39,430) is equal to Paris'. With soaring revenues (up 16.7% in 1956), the feeders estimate an annual income of $100 million in only a few years. Yet the lines lose money every time they take to the air. They already cost taxpayers $27 million annually in subsidies, will probably cost more with each passing year.

The main problem is an almost complete dependence on a fleet of 188 low-capacity Douglas DC-35, the 21-year-old aerial workhorses that no longer pay their way no matter how efficiently they are operated. San Francisco's cos-t-conscious Southwest Airways has cut ground stops to only 120 seconds, but maintenance and operating costs keep going up. "A spare part that used to cost maybe 80^," explains one airline man, "runs about $5 now, and has to be specially made." Even if the feeders, which operate with an average load factor of 45%, could boost their loads to the big trunklines' average of 65%, the DC-3 would still lose money. The revenues would equal only 87.5^ a mile v. a cost of about $1 a mile.