SHIPPING AND AIRCRAFT

Hokitika Guardian, 9 October 1928, Page 5

SHIPPING AND AIRCRAFT

(Australian Press Association). LONDON, October'B, Unless the shipowners utilise aircraft as an ally 7, said Sir Sefton Brancker, in his presidential address to the Institute of Transport, they 7 will find therein a definite inevitable rival depriving them of some of their most valuable traffic, namely mails and passengers, who are prepared to pay for speed. lie suggested the shipowners’ future programmes should arrange to carry first-class mails and speed passengers by air. This would enable them to build slower but more comfortable and profitable ships If or ordinary passengers and freight overseas. Railways. which had beew constructed in order to create traffic, offered lessons for development in Imperial air routes. Governments must subsidise them until fully established. He pointed out the regular commercial services world-wide flew 22,887,000 miles last year, compared with 1,170,000 in 1919. and the routes regularly covered were 73,300 miles. Every extension decreased overhead charges. Air transport at present will not bo profitable because it could not deal with heavy freights and third class passengers who are the mainstays of mo st of the railways and shipping lines. He believed that probably a weekly air service to Tndia would pay at no distant date. Among future possibiltics would be liners equipped as air-craft carriers.