Chief of Airway

(See front cover)

At the north side of the new Department of Commerce Building in Washington is a corridor richly paneled in black walnut. It is called "Secretaries' row." Opening from it are three large offices. Secretary Lament's is in the centre. Assistant Secretary Julius Klein's is on the right. In the one on the left sits Col. Clarence Marshall Young, Assistant Secretary for Aeronautics.

From his flat-topped walnut desk in the far corner Col. Young can step to a wall map and survey the domain which he helped to build and over which he rules. There a network of dark lines traces 21,764 mi. of airway. Scattered white pins mark the nation's 2,034 airports. Lighted emergency landing fields stand out as 382 green pins while 53 blue pins designate radio beacons, 1,567 red pins, rotating beacon lights, 386 nickel pins, acetylene blinkers.

As he sat in his office last week Col. Young thumbed through two new volumes which reported the 1932 state of the Air Empire represented on the map and of the industry that lives in it. The volumes were The Aircraft Year Book for 1932 compiled by the Aeronautical Chamber of Commerce* and the annual statistical number of Aviation, edited by Edward Pearson Warner, onetime Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Aeronautics. The information in the volumes was not all new to Col. Young, because his department had supplied much of it. But together they set forth aeronautical facts & figures which gave Col. Young and the public-at-large a quick bird's-eye view of U. S. aviation. Prime facts & figures:

Civilian & commercial airplanes flew approximately 145,000,000 mi. last year, a decrease of about 20,000,000 mi. from 1930. The decrease was accounted for by a decline in private flying and such miscellaneous air activities as sightseeing, instruction, and photography. Scheduled air transport continued to boom, but not so much as in recent years. For the first time since 1925 it failed to double its previous year's record for passenger-mileage. Nevertheless it was up some 20% in a year when railroad and steamship travel slumped heavily. Transport planes carried 457,800 passengers, flew 43,400,000 mi.

On only about 25% of the airways are passengers offered services of more than two round trips per day. On only about 1,200 mi. in scattered sections is there anything like high-frequency passenger service. Average passenger fare is 6.53-c- per mi. against 7.4-c- a year ago.

The transport safety record gave great promise at midyear but accidents finally rose from 91 in 1930 to 126 in 1931. Eleven pilots were killed, 26 passengers. Result: Transport planes flew 375,000 mi. per accident, against 400,000 the year before.

Hard times reduced the number of companies manufacturing planes from 215 to 110, of which only about 40 were in active production last year. The value of all aircraft, engines and parts sold, fell from $53,466,000 to $49,097,000. Significantly military sales accounted for two-thirds of the 1931 business.

The Chief. Like the two other Assistant Secretaries for Aeronautics, War's Frederick Trubee Davison and Navy's David Sinton Ingalls, Clarence Young was graduated from Yale (1910). He practiced insurance law in Iowa, his home state, until the U. S. entered the War, when he became pilot of an Italian bomber. Shot down over the^ Austrian lines by an anti-aircraft shell which flopped his big plane upside down. Pilot Young was a prisoner of war until he escaped to Italy in a box car. Back again in Iowa he organized the first company to sell Wartime "Jenny" planes, disposed of 50 at $5,000 each. Also he ran a flying school, went barnstorming, had his share of crack-ups from occasional foolhardiness. After directing the aviation program at the Philadelphia Sesquicentennial Exposition (1926) he was appointed Chief of Air Regulation under William Patterson MacCracken Jr., the first Assistant Secretary of the Commerce Department's newly formed Aeronautics Branch. In that capacity he issued to Mr. MacCracken Pilot's License No. 1 after Orville Weight had modestly declined it because he no longer flew. Col. Young received in turn No. 2. When Assistant Secretary MacCracken resigned in 1929 there was no doubt in anyone's mind as to who knew most about _his job. Pilot Young was promptly appointed.

Today Col. Young enjoys enormous popularity in the industry and practically universal respect. Utterly conscientious in administering his job, he is incapable of political ballplaying. Many a manufacturer school director or transport operator has learned that "The Chief" may submit to being called by his first name, but is quick to meet each & every request for an easy or lax interpretation of Government rules with: "The Air Commerce Act says 'No!'"

No swivel-chair administrator, Assistant Secretary Young traveled 30,000 mi. last year, boarded a train only twice. Mostly he journeys in the Department of Commerce Ford NS-1 which, equipped in club-car fashion with a desk and radio headphones in the cabin, serves as his flying office and from which every detail of airway construction, maintenance, lighting and radio weather-reporting can be observed first hand. Only touch of elegance in the cabin is a brilliant maroon felt pillow with the seal of the Aeronautics Branch (a beacon over which flies the original Wright Brothers' plane) on one side; on the other the name of Clarence M. Young in orange letters. The pillow was the gift and particular pride of Col. Young's pilot, plump John Cable. In one or another of the Department's planes the Colonel still puts in enough hours of actual piloting to keep his transport license and reserve commission active.

Col. Young works long hours. The golf sticks which he took to Washington with him three years ago have never been out of their bag. Tall, bronzed, 42, much less social than the other flying assistant secretaries, he is not married, lives alone in the Hay-Adams House across Lafayette Square from the White House. He smokes cigarets furiously, curses lustily.

Long agitated in Washington is a proposal to shift control of the airways from the Department of Commerce to the Interstate Commerce Commission. Such a proposal is embodied in a bill introduced by Senator Sam Gilbert Bratton of New Mexico. Instead of the present Department of Commerce certificate of authority, indicating only fitness to operate, it would require every airline to obtain a certificate of necessity & convenience from the I. C. C., submit to regulation of rates, schedules and finance like the railroads. Says Col. Young of the proposal: "Premature. . . . The industry is too young to be 'frozen' by excessive restrictions."

*Published by D. Van Nostrand Co., $6.

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