AIR TRANSPORT

Wairarapa Times-Age, 18 August 1942, Page 4

AIR TRANSPORT

QUICK AND REMARKABLE' DEVELOPMENT ASSURED AFTER WAR. “FLYING BOX CARS” COMING. Wc hardly realise it yet, but the success scored by bigger and bigger transport planes in carrying everything from jeep-cars to fully equipped troops all over the map is building up breathtaking possibilities for post-war aviation (Mr William H. Stringer wrote recently in the "Christian Science Monitor.”)

Grover Loening, aeronautical engineer, rang up the curtain on post-war predictions in a speech before the Foreign Commerce Club in New York recently. Since then aviation reports and discussions by plane designers have only served to amplify the picture of how transport planes, both passenger and freight, will serve to annihilate distance all around the globe when the birds of war become the carriers of peace. The possibilities are tremendous. North Americans may find themselves eating fresh fruit picked 36 hours earlier in Argentina. Travellers may be able to hurtle in air liners from New York to London overnight, or to Brazil in a few additional hours and to the Orient in a day and a half. Lowfare airplane "day coaches” may be available for shorter runs. Express from Chicago may be shipped direct to Chile without stop-overs at seacoasts. If this sounds fantastic, the air experts assure us that, even as the aviation advertisement's say of transport of all first-class mail by air: “It’s coming.” Planes capable of accomplishing these wonders have been built or are now on the designing boards. Problems of lift, fuel, capacity limitations and take-off with heavy load have been overcome. The war is producing American factories capable of turning out 125,000 airplanes in 1943. The end of the conflict will find at least 300,000 trained pilots in the United States alone and still more mechanics. The inventive genius which can turn automobile factories into tank arsenals will be able similarly to produce “flying box cars” where pursuit planes and bombers are hatched today. The armed forces have pioneered developments which may make the coming years an “air peace” even as the present conflict is becoming more and more an “air war.” The Ferry Command has delivered heavy bombers by flight across thS seven seas, cargo planes are helping to replace the lost Burma Road traffic into China, and trans-African routes are supplying supply bases in the Middle East. Mr Loening declared that 40,000 of the presently-experimental Douglas B--19 planes, with a useful load of 20 tons, could replace all the surface vessels now operating in the United Nations pool. Other designers have projected planes which are virtually freight-cars with wings, or which feature fusilages made of detachable cargo containers.

Passenger air liners have been designed which have all the luxurious appointments of the ocean greyhounds except for the swimming pools, which would be out of place in the brief, stratospheric flight-hours projected. This does not mean that the railroad and steamship lines will be outdated, according to the expert consensus. There are still the problems of high cost, complete safety and weather to be conquered before “everyone will fly.” Shippers recall, for instance, that the air freight rate between New York and Buenos Aires is roughly five times that charged for surface transportation. While air express will pay, one can hardly vision using costly air freighters to carry heavy loads of raw materials —bauxite, lumber, oil or coal, about which there is no rush. Nor will air travel do away with the enjoyment of leisurely ocean cruises. What does loom is the prospect that the airplanes, in partnership (and sometimes in competition) with the steamships and railroads, will greatly increase man's ability to go places and obtain goods, will accomplish a vast new intercourse of the peoples and supplies of the earth. When the predictions of the aeronautical experts come to pass—when Chicago is a world airport even as New York today is a world seaport, and when a family may tour Europe on a week’s summer vacation —one is bound to ask: What will become of isolation and the ancient isolationist argument?