“MILK LIFT” FROM ULSTER TO LANCS: 64 TRIPS DAILY

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 13, Issue 26, 29 November 1948, Page 3

“MILK LIFT” FROM ULSTER TO LANCS: 64 TRIPS DAILY

(By Reece Smith, New Zealand Kemsley Empire Journalist) Belfast, October 20. While the Berlin air lift hogged the headlines a more peaceful operation has been providing sound information and incomes for air freight operators, a class who previously found both these commodities in short supply. From August 31 to October 12 one and a quarter million gallons of milk were flown from dairying Ulster to industrial Lancashire by air charter companies. Through an accountant’s eyeS the milk lift is not so attractive. Ulster milk is reckoned to cost 5/5 a gallon delivered to the Lancashire consumer. Subsidies keep the price down to normal. The job of flying the milk across has been done by a maximum of 16 aircraft, averaging four trips each a day. The machines are Dakotas, Liberators and Haltons (freighting Halifaxes). It would bring the operation nearer a commercial proposition to have aircraft fitted with bulk tanks, as the ordinary milk cans in which the load has been carried amount to a considerable weight in themselves. The charter companies know that the way to make coinmercial flying profitable is to keep aircraft in the air with paying loads. To this end, they stocked up with aircrews so. as to fly their aircraft round the clock. Many mushroom concerns bought up ex R.A.F. aircraft cheap after the war, and went broke before they learned this lesson of maximum utilisation. .Till the air lifts the scratchy custom offering was putting air tramping beyond the resources of firms with no alternative interests.

The milk lift is shutting down as the machines are called off to Berlin, where thgre is a maximum reward of £l5O per flying hour. Even small firms can get by on that. For the moment they are relieved’ of worries of undercut prices, and finding back loadings.