Transport: Mount Newark

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In Chicago last week New York's Mayor LaGuardia climbed aboard a TW Airliner, found himself four hours later at Newark Airport. There he refused to deplane with the ship's other passengers. Said he: "My ticket reads 'to New York', and I am going to New York." TWA officials had him flown on alone to New York's Municipal Airport at Floyd Bennett Field.

Thus did Mayor LaGuardia dramatize his city's long fight to get the airline business away from Newark. Floyd Bennett Field, built five years ago on Brooklyn's Barren Island at a cost of $4,000,000, has been virtually deserted while Newark Airport grew fat & famed as the world's busiest commercial flying field. But the latter's sagging runways, built on filled-in marshland, are so bumpy that airline pilots call it "Mount Newark." For lack of hangar space at Newark, TWA has agreed to move to Floyd Bennett by Jan.1. To hold other airlines at "Mount Newark," Mayor Ellenstein offered them free hangar rent for six months, no more municipal taxes on gas, oil, mail & passengers.

Prime obstacle to Floyd Bennett's capture of the airline business is the fact that Newark is the official metropolitan airmail terminus. The threat to move the mail elsewhere caused New Jersey's Governor Moore last week to wire Postmaster General Farley: "It would be rather a shabby trick to play upon Newark after it had spent such vast sums [$5,000,000] to facilitate the Federal mail service."