Passenger Airlines

"Wouldn't it be nice," said Mrs. Manhattanite to her husband, "if we could go to the theatre tonight and at midnight you could fly to Chicago in time for that conference tomorrow morning?"

"Wouldn't it be nice," said Mrs. Chicagoan to her husband, "if, after a hard half-day at the office, you could take me to a Manhattan night club?"

Such excursions will not only be "nice" but also possible within four months, if one has faith in Giuseppe Mario Bellanca, designer of the monoplane, Columbia, which carried Pilot Chamberlin and Passenger Levine across the Atlantic (TIME, June 13).

Last week, Mr. Bellanca announced that he had contracted to build five triple-motored planes for passenger service between New York and Chicago. The trip will be made in seven and a half hours. The fare (one way) will be in the neighborhood of $60--50% greater than railroad fare. Each plane will carry twelve passengers, a pilot-navigator and a steward who will serve meals, operate the radio and be emergency pilot. The cost of each plane, equipped with three Wright Whirlwind motors, will be $28,500. The company will be financed by A. R. Martine of the Bankers' Service Co., Manhattan.

Said Mr. Martine: "The pilots will do simple straight flying [averaging 100 miles per hour] with no stunts and no races against time. . . . There is no comparison between the comfort of traveling by airplane and traveling by railroad. Our passengers will sit in comfortable chairs. They can get up and walk around. From their seats they can survey the country rolling past beneath them."

Three days after the Bellanca-Martine announcement, Col. Charles Augustus Lindbergh emerged from conferences in Washington to speak five sentences concerning "the establishment at an early date of a passenger-carrying air transport line that will be national in its scope." Possible allies of Colonel Lindbergh are such men as William B. Mayo, chief of the aircraft division of the Ford Motor Co.; Harry Knight, Harold M. Bixby and William B. Robertson, the St. Louis backers of Colonel Lindbergh's transatlantic flight; Howard E. Coffin and Paul Henderson of the National Air Transport Inc. (air mail operators); Casey Jones, skillful pilot; Chester W. Cuthell, onetime U. S. Shipping Board counsel. It seemed likely that this group would form a huge corporation, would put ships in the skies to compete with the Bellanca planes over the New York-Chicago route, would eventually link every U. S. metropolis.

Thus, a competition to carry the U. S. public in the air looms between the backers of a 25-year-old Nordic, Charles Augustus Lindbergh, who is everybody's hero, and the backers of a 41-year-old Latin, Giuseppe Mario Bellanca, who is as obscure in the popular eye as he is small in stature (5 ft., 1 in.). And yet, it is Mr. Bellanca who designed the Columbia that stayed in the air over the U. S. for 51 hours and later flew 3,905 miles, who carries in his pocket the plans for a plane to travel 300 miles per hour, who carries in his mind the plans for gigantic transatlantic airliners, who is regarded by European experts as the leader in modern design.

Years ago, in the cliff-perched village of Sciacca on the island of Sicily, the boy Bellanca watched ships cut the sea and kites cut the air. There was a similarity, he thought. He made his kite fly horizontally, like a glider. His imagination roamed--"a little fan in front, and I could fancy it there flying by itself."

At 17, he went to the Royal Institute at Milan to study to be an engineer and "an expert businessman." One day, he heard that a Frenchman, Leon Delagrange, had made a six-minute airplane flight.* His dreams suddenly took shape--he would build ships of the air; he would learn to sail them; he

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales . . ./-

Then Giuseppe Mario Bellanca began to put sticks and canvas together. His first plane, a compromise in design between his own ideas and those of his friends who furnished the money, crashed at the start of its maiden voyage. He was convinced that the early pusher type of plane with propeller in the rear was wrong. His next plane, which he hoped would conquer the English channel, was designed with the propeller in front, No one seemed anxious to purchase a motor for him, so he stayed on the ground--again disappointed--while Louis Bleriot crossed the English Channel (1909).

Broken in health and finances, Mr. Bellanca came to the U. S. His relatives helped him secure funds to build a monoplane in Brooklyn. He taught himself to fly, set up an aviation school. During the War, he lost a contract with the British government because he did not have the money to swing it. He designed planes for a Maryland concern until it went bankrupt.

Finally, in a garage in Omaha, he smiled at disappointments as he built the Bellanca VIII--a monoplane of large wing surface, with struts, fuselage and tail all designed to give great lifting power. People thought the plane a little queer. Nevertheless, it won 13 efficiency prizes, aided by a little Anzani motor which Mr. Bellanca purchased from a junkman for $75. As everyone now knows, the famed Columbia is a Bellanca VIII equipped with a Wright Whirlwind motor.

Mr. Bellanca once said: "I thought that God put the birds in the air. But suddenly I realized that they flew because they fulfilled the conditions of flying."

When the heavens fill with commerce, people will be thankful; partly because Mr. Bellanca was so wise in that garage in Omaha.

*Shortly after the Wright brothers' first flight at Kitty Hawk, N. C., in 1903, of which Student Bellanca had no knowledge.

/-Alfred Lord Tennyson's Locksley Pall.