New and Good

Into action last week went the first transcontinental airway ever born full grown. It was also the first airline to span Canada, bridging the 2,688 miles between Montreal and Vancouver. The 130,000,000 U. S. citizens have only just begun to support their three transcontinental air routes. Whether the passenger traffic from 11,120,000 Canadians could support one did not bother Trans-Canada's operators. The line is Government-controlled and should pay its way by airmail revenue alone.

Custom-made from the last kit of carburetor wrenches in its Winnipeg shop to its corps of well-drilled, 9540-125 Ib. hostesses, Trans-Canada Air Lines is piloted by 40 veteran Canadian airmen who were instructed for a year by U. S. airline veterans. First scheduled night flights last week followed a course that had an emergency field every 35 miles, a major airport with radio range every 100.

When Canada finally found several years ago that it needed an airline to speed mail and passengers between cities in its best populated strip just north of the U. S. border, its smart decision was that it would do no experimenting, would cash in instead on what U. S. airlines had learned, little by little, the hard way. Beyond its own necessity for the transcontinental route, it had the added responsibility of hooking up its centres with Imperial Airways' transatlantic service scheduled for opening this summer.

In 1937 Canada's Parliament authorized $5,000,000 as a dowry for Trans-Canada and agreed, in addition, that the Government would supply fields for the line. It turned over its stock to Government-controlled Canadian National Railways, thus putting Trans-Canada into the arms of C. N. R.'s President Samuel James Hungerford. Sam Hungerford promptly passed Trans-Canada on to a U. S. expert, stubby, taciturn Philip Gustav Johnson. Mr. Johnson had been making trucks in Seattle, Wash, since 1936, after the 1934 Roosevelt airmail purge with its compulsory reorganizations had thrown him out of the presidency of United Air Lines.

Phil Johnson hired an operations expert from United and a group of pilots and maintenance men from United and other U. S. airlines, briskly set up instrument and night-flying schools for Canadian pilots, picked airport sites, generally furnished Canada's airline complete, from runways to radios.

Already carrying mail at 6-c- the first ounce as in the U. S., 5-c- for each additional ounce (6-c- in the U. S.), Trans-Canada expects to begin passenger service in its Lockheed 145 within a few weeks. For mail and passenger business from outside Canada it offers a 20-hour schedule from New York to Vancouver, and, after the transatlantic service begins, it will help get you in 40 hours from London to the Pacific coast.

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