Pan Am Stretches

Last week Pan American Airways stretched its lines to within 6,000 miles of encircling the globe. The company was authorized by the U.S. Government to set up a ferry and transport service to Africa.

Although preparations for the move had been in progress for some time. Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, in their nautical conversations fortnight ago, apparently agreed that the Near East and North Africa would soon be a hot spot of war. The British were ready to go into Iran, anxious to go into Libya. The U.S. was fearful lest the Nazis establish themselves in West Africa, hopeful that by strong measures and soft answers General Maxime Weygand might still be kept out of the Axis tents (see p. 16). To all these ends, it would be advisable to rush planes and other equipment to the Middle East, and to establish and strengthen transport bases in West Africa.

This was a job for pros. The R.A.F., which has for at least six months been ferrying planes from Freetown to Cairo, has lost about 20% of its planes for lack of the gadgets and getup necessary for steady, lossless shuttling. It was an echo of the 1934 U.S. airmail fiasco; the U.S. Army just could not handle the business.

The new Pan Am route will go from New York City (with Baltimore as alter nate) to San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Port of Spain, Trinidad, to Belem and Natal, Brazil. Then it will hop 1,800 miles -- not quite the span from Newfoundland to Ireland -- across the Atlantic to Monrovia, Liberia (Bathurst, Gambia and Freetown, Sierra Leone as alternates), will hug the hump of Africa as far as Nigeria, then cut across to Khartoum and perhaps eventually to Cairo. Across Africa, Pan Am planned direction finders, hangars, fields, communications and weather stations, resthouses. Priorities for the necessary materials are expected to be granted shortly. The company intends to have the service functioning before snow flies in the U.S.

All this made everybody but the Germans very happy. It pleased Britain, whose forces would get more U.S. planes quicker, whose ferry pilots would be released for combat. It pleased the U.S., which would achieve a preliminary security by getting air bases flanking Dakar. It pleased Pan Am, which now needed only a Cairo-to-Singapore link to have the basis of the sole round-the-world postwar airline.

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