The Biggest Job Begins

U.S. airlines were hell-bent last week on the biggest and fastest expansion in world aviation history. Within a few months airline operators expect to triple the number of planes they fly, double their personnel of skilled pilots and ground workers, extend their routes to every corner of the world, triple their air-freight tonnage.

However fantastic, this is neither airline propaganda nor an operator's pipe-dream. It was announced at an eye-popping press conference in Washington by cheerful, down-to-earth General Harold Lee ("Bombardment") George, chief of the Army's newly formed Air Transport Command. A combination of the old Ferry Command and the Air Service Command, ATC's stupendous assignment is to fly thousands of soldiers and tons & tons of materiel to world-sprawled fighting fronts in the fastest possible time.

To do the job, ATC looked around for a partner, picked the privately owned U.S. airlines because of the bang-up job they did under the Air Service Command (TIME, June 29). With one eye on previous experience and the other on location of supply and maintenance bases, ATC has already assigned wartime routes to ten major U.S. airlines (including Pan Am and Panagra), will hand out other routes when it can iron out details with the remaining eleven U.S. airlines.

Most of the routes handed out are already flown by U.S. airliners on a willy-nilly, fly-when-you-must basis. But within a few months this will change to a worldwide air-commuting service far bigger than anything air-minded fanatics expected to see before 1950. Thus American and T.W.A. will fly to London at least 24 times every day; United and Pan Am will wing to Australia and India 20-30 times weekly; Braniff, Eastern and Panagra will zip to Central and South America almost as often as crack trains cross the U.S.

To do this flying the Army has promised to "lend-lease" new cargo planes to the airlines as fast as they come off production lines--a minimum of 300 by Christmas. Said General George: "The only limit is [the airlines'] ability to expand." Biggest immediate addition will be scores of sturdy, twin-engined Douglas DC-35, now rolling off California production lines at a record clip. Next will come giant 25-ton Douglas DC-45, able to tote a ten-ton payload non-stop for 2,200 miles. For the rest of the fleet the Army will lend the airlines huge newfangled Curtiss Commando transports and big-bellied Consolidated 6-24 bombers converted into cargo planes.

Biggest hitch is personnel--good pilots and mechanics are harder to find than smooth airfields in Africa. But airline operators expect to squeak through the pilot shortage by giving jobs to 1) independent air taxi operators; 2) airmen from the Civil Air Patrol; 3) newly trained men. For more mechanics the airlines have turned to a brand-new mass training technique. In Kansas City, T.W.A. is training repair crew specialists in 60 days v. two years for old-line, all-round aviation mechanics. Only drawback: the 1942 model mechanic knows, for example, only the radio, or the ignition system, or cylinder work, or wing repair. To help out, the Army plans to pull 50,000 tinker-minded soldiers out of U.S. camps by Oct. 15, ship them off to airline-operated schools. Most airline executives were tickled silly at a chance to show their stuff on the new program, unveiled a few recent achievements to prove they could do almost anything. Sample feats:

> In the last week of May, a fleet of 29 airline-operated cargo ships hauled 899,000 Ib. of supplies--almost four times as much as Army pilots ever carried--along with 607 military passengers.

> A single Pan Am plane shuttled between Brazil and Africa ten times in six days. Miles flown: 18,500. Cargo: officers, soldiers, medical supplies, oil and gasoline for African air bases.

>Loaded with Army bigwigs and rush-rush military supplies, a 6-24 bomber took off from Washington, D.C. airport Monday noon, made a 21,000-mile round trip across the Pacific, and was back in Washington on Friday.

Freezing 22% of all U. S. charge accounts July 10 (1,643,000 in all) made hardly a ripple in U. S. retail-trade totals. Dollar volume the next week was up 5% above the 1941 level, better than the average for the three preceding weeks.

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