"Taranaki Central Press” MONDAY, MARCH 22, 1937. PACIFIC AIR SERVICE.

Taranaki Central Press, Volume IV, Issue 389, 22 March 1937, Page 4

"Taranaki Central Press” MONDAY, MARCH 22, 1937. PACIFIC AIR SERVICE.

An American flying-boat is now on its way down to New Zealand from San Francisco on a survey flight over the route of the regular service shortly to be inaugurated. The occasion is important, even more important in its way than that famous flight in which Kingsford Smith pioneered the air voyage across the Pacific, for that was an adventure and this is business.

It has taken nearly a decade for commercial enterprise to turn Kingsford Smith’s magnificent stunt to profitable use, and even now New Zealand owes this ending of her isolation to American, and not to British, ambitions. There is more than a little significance in the fact that the Americans should be starting this 6000mile service before the 1 200-mile gap between Australia and New Zealand has been closed by Imperial Airways, and it is worth inquiring why it has happened.

The reason, no doubt, is that the Americans are determined to establish their air dominance of the Pacific before any possible competitors can get ahead of them. The Atlantic has to be shared with Britain and the European nations, but the Pacific can be made an American ocean. Already Pan American Airways operates a regular service to the Philippines, and it goes without saying that all the services in the northern Pacific will have to radiate from Honolulu, which must also become the virtual starting point for services to the south. The Americans are realising the tremendous advantage given them by the possession of Hawaii and are determined to exploit it. Possibly, too. they have the ambition to achieve in the air a supremacy comparable to that established on the sea by the merchant fleets of Britain. By the end of the year the American clippers will be visiting Auckland every other week. How long will it be before there is a comparable Tasman service?