Kennedy's Clippers

When the Merchant Marine Act of 1936 was approved by Congress last summer it established a U. S. Maritime Commission, empowered it to manage U. S. shipping and to investigate and report upon the shape of things to come. Fortnight ago, Commission Chairman Joseph Patrick Kennedy presented such a reckoning (TIME, Nov. 22). Last week he made another report, not on sea ships but on the relation of sea ships to airships. To many a landlubber the second report may seem like a Utopian dream, except that it also bears the earmarks of Joe Kennedy's hard-headed eagerness to face economic facts. Chairman Kennedy's plan is not to junk the shipping lines which it is his job to salvage, but to encourage them to extend their services into the air.

Clippers. The first fact it calls attention to is the safety and reliability of over-ocean travel--30 transatlantic seaplane test flights made in 1937, and 7,000,000 passenger miles flown over the Pacific. Then the report plunges into the economic aspects of air and sea travel, comparing the costs of a liner such as the Normandie, a dirigible 28% bigger than the late Hindenburg and a 40-passenger, 120,000-lb. flying boat.* For U. S. shipyards to build a Normandie would cost $50,000,000. A fleet of dirigibles with the same annual passenger capacity would cost about the same. For just about a third of that sum enough flying boats could be constructed to handle the same number of passengers in one-fifth the time, at approximately the same fare as a superliner now charges. Looking ten years ahead, the Commission believes it can foresee seaplanes weighing a quarter of a million pounds, costing about $3,000,000 each and carrying 150 passengers. "Six of these large boats could carry 109,500 passengers a year at an estimated construction cost of $19,700,000 as against the superliner carrying 96,000 passengers a year at a construction cost estimated at $50,000,000."

Dirigibles. For non-stop schedules to Japan, Australia, South America and Africa, the report recommends the economic superiority of helium-filled dirigibles carrying 200 passengers, estimates their cost at $4,000,000 each. Of their safety it says, "While their size makes them vulnerable in high winds when making ground contacts (which are no hardship whatever to airplanes--rather, an advantage), nevertheless, the impossibility of slowing an airplane down brings with it a certain element of risk not present in the dirigible."

Planners. Credit for this ultra-modern document under Chairman Kennedy's signature goes to spade worker Robert Emerson Lees, onetime WPA Airport & Airways assistant director who joined the Maritime Commission eleven months ago, and to Aeronautical Adviser Grover Cleveland Loening, under whose direct supervision the report was drawn up. Adviser Loening, 49, appointed to the Commission six months ago, is a rich, dapper socialite, honest and unafraid of officialdom. A life-long aviation enthusiast, and manufacturer of the world's first successful amphibian, he said two years ago in his book Our Wings Grow Faster: "The handwriting is on the walls for the steamship lines. ... At 500 m.p.h., 50,000 ft. above the ocean . . . this is the way we will cross from New York to London in six hours in the not very distant future."

If the possibilities of air auxiliaries to the U. S. merchant fleet are the most hopeful which Joseph Kennedy has been able to find in the whole shipping picture, one thing at least seemed certain. Those possibilities are not likely to be realized even in part before Joe Kennedy, weary of the toughest job he has ever tackled, gives up his job as head of the Maritime Com-mission to seek more promising fields of endeavor.

*Biggest to date is the Martin transport completed last week for the Soviet Government. Weight, 63,000 lb.; wingspan 157 ft.; length 92 ft.; h.p. 4,000; cruising speed 170 m.p.h.; range 4,500 miles; payload 10,000 lb.

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