Thought for Peace

Britain's servants last week gave evidence that they are doing something about postwar aviation (TIME, Feb. 15, et seq.). A House of Lords committee headed by pudgy Lord Brabazon, onetime Air Minister and Minister of Aircraft Production, already had some recommendations to make: 1) the design of civil aircraft, lately sacrificed to Britain's all-out war effort, should be resumed; 2) engineering preparations should be made for converting bombers into airliners (one Lancaster has already been converted into a transport plane called the York); 3) the aircraft industry should be put to work building prototypes of new and better airliners.

Air Secretary Sir Archibald Sinclair disclosed that Britain has taken steps to offset the world-round impact of the U.S. Air Forces' Transport Commands--an operation which is solely for war, but is bound to blaze the way for U.S. commercial operations after the war. The R.A.F. has formed its own Transport Command to work with British Overseas Airways Corp., whose transport operations have been sadly crimped. The R.A.F.'s famed Ferry Command, which has been whisking bombers across the North Atlantic for almost two years and has lately spread to the South Atlantic, will be subordinated to the new Transport Command. New Chief of the Transport Command: wispy, red-browed Air Chief Marshal Sir Frederick Bowhill, head of Ferry Command since June 16, 1941.

For the British, the Transport Command was an important move. On the world's new international airways, British pilots will now have a chance to absorb the newfangled techniques of land-plane, over-water, high-speed operation which the U.S. has been developing.

But Britain, rich in bases, is poor in some of the tools of international air transport. Hence the British keenly feel the need for international agreements which will equalize competitors at the postwar starting line. Said Walter Leslie Runciman, head of B.O.A.C.: "After the war you will have victors and neutrals feeling they must have some kind of air transport and if you are not careful you are going to have airline competition between governments with a disarmament-political complex. If that happens the Americans will have all the advantages because they have the planes and the money. . . .

"Unless you get a decently organized world air-transport system, you are not going to get a decently organized world."

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