Hands Across the Air

In Manhattan American Airlines' ticket offices were bedlams.

At one ticket counter a soft-voiced woman had the ear of a clerk. "Can I get two tickets to Boston?" she inquired. The clerk asked who the other passenger was.

"He's in a hearse outside," the woman explained. The clerk's eyes widened. "I must get him to Boston," pleaded the woman, "his funeral's tomorrow." Too busy was the harried clerk to find out whether the woman had intended upending the cadaver in the other seat, or whether she supposed that airliners, like trains, carried baggage cars ahead.

More than 60% of the thousands who took to the air when last week's wind and rain washed out transportation facilities on the eastern seaboard (see p. 11) had never flown before. Between Manhattan and Boston, American Airlines, only line flying the 200 mile route, carries about 200 passengers on its ten scheduled flights back and forth. But on each of the first two days following the hurricane 1,000 passengers were flown from Manhattan to Boston alone and perhaps half that number carried from Boston to Manhattan by a combined service of four lines. By this week approximately 60,000 Ibs. of express --serum, clothing, telephone repair apparatus, newspapers--and 57,000 Ibs. of mail had been flown into New England.

Grounded during the big blow itself, American Airlines started flying next morning. By 9 o'clock every scheduled flight was booked solid. By noon there was a waiting list of 800. Unable to carry more than a small percentage of the demand, even by tripling its service, American Airlines got Civil Aeronautics Authority permission to waive its franchise, then asked other airlines to help out. United Air Lines, Eastern Airlines and Transcontinental & Western Air pitched in. When at week's end railroad grades and highways were got back into shape, other lines retired after the busiest spell of flying U. S. airlines had ever undertaken.

Significant was the pooling of equipment and the disregard of route franchises.

Railroads have met many a crisis in this manner, but never airlines. Ironic angle was that American Airlines, which last week showed the way for future interchange of air services, had only last year successfully opposed the plan of United Air Lines and Western Air Express to fly each other's equipment--United Mainliners from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles, W. A. E.'s ships to Chicago--as a convenience to passengers who otherwise had to be routed out of sleeper berths at unearthly hours to change planes. Reason: such a pooling would have let unfranchised United ships into American-T. W. A.-monopolized Los Angeles.

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