Up from the Mailbags

On a dusty airport outside Detroit one February day in 1926, Henry Ford braced himself against a cutting wind, and lifted a sack of mail to a goggled pilot in an open-cockpit Stout monoplane. The engine roared, and the little 100-m.p.h. plane lurched down the runway and took off for Cleveland, 91 miles away. It was the first flight of airmail under the recently passed Kelly Act. To airmen, it was the beginning of commercial aviation in the U.S. Until then, the U.S. Army and a few private operators had flown the mail for the Post Office Department on a spotty basis. The Kelly Act turned over the job entirely to private airline companies. With that guarantee of basic revenue, fly-by-night little companies (which usually flew by day) scrambled to cash in, and the new industry took off.

Last week, as the U.S. aviation industry celebrated the 25th anniversary of the first flight, a Capital Airlines 300-m.p.h. Constellation made a sentimental journey with 38 passengers over the same 237-mile route. The flight symbolized the growth of aviation to a billion-dollar U.S. enterprise, with 1,542 planes which fan out over 170,000 miles of routes to every corner of the nation. At peak flying hours (5 to 6 p.m.), an average of more than 500 scheduled airliners is aloft, with some 11,000 people aboard. Day & night there

is one take-off or landing of a domestic scheduled airliner on an average of every eight seconds. Last year 17,162,000 passengers rode the U.S. airways, compared to only 5,782 in 1926.

Growing Pains. The airlines' early passengers were a hardy lot. Bundled in leather flying suits and fur-lined helmets, they rode singly in open de Havilland4 cockpits atop piles of mail sacks, or cramped side by side in a cubbyhole in front of the pilot of the Boeing 40.

Gradually, the planes improved. Ford's famed Tri-Motor appeared with a cabin with room for 16. In 1929 came the crate-like, twin-engine Curtiss Condor, a 21-place goliath, followed in a few years by Douglas' famed DC-3.

In 1938, out of the confusion of air lines and routes, the Civil Aeronautics Authority began to bring order; two years later the Civil Aeronautics Board was created, began standardizing fares, assigning routes, and applying a new mail-pay formula to spread subsidy payments.

To date, subsidies and mail pay (there is no way to break them down) have totaled $524 million.

Lusty Giant. Last year the combined net operating income of the 16 big trunk lines was $51 million, a 50% gain over the 1949 figure. Profits are headed still higher this year (TIME, Feb. 12). Fatal accidents have dropped from 28 per 100 million passenger-miles in 1930 to 1.3 in 1949 (v. .08 for railroads and 2.0 for autos and taxis). Air travel accounted for 2.9% of intercity passengers carried by public carriers in the U.S. in 1950 (v. 37.1% for trains and 60% for buses) and 11.5% of the total passenger-miles racked up. But, said CAB Vice Chairman Oswald Ryan last week, "Air transportation has not been brought within reach of the masses of people of limited means." Until it is, the U.S. commercial aviation industry will not really have come of age.

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