The Limitless Sky

At a secret airport in India, a flight of pot-bellied new U.S. air freighters settled on the runways, waddled up to the parking line, disgorged their cargo through yawning doors in their fuselages. As American airmen watched this sight last week, they caught a glimpse of a bright postwar world.

Less than five days before, those freight ers had been loaded in the U.S. Crack air line pilots, to whom ocean-flying had be come routine, had taken them across 15,-ooo miles of war-char ted airways with no more trouble than they once hauled mail and passengers between New York and Chicago. It was the biggest mass freight flight in aviation history. And although its total freight load was only 90 tons, airmen knew that when peace comes that load could be multiplied almost indefinitely.

All that will be needed to increase air freight tenfold, or a thousandfold, when peace comes, are more and bigger planes and an understanding among nations. Aviation can guarantee the planes. Some of them, like Consolidated's new 400-passenger transport, are on the drafting boards. The tremendous rest is up to the world's statesmen.

So far as airmen are concerned, aviation's blueprint of international air routes will be the blueprint of peace.

Fortune of War. As it had often done before, war had forced the making of this pattern for peace. And by the fortune of war it is U.S. flyers who have had the big gest part in creating that pattern.

Thus it fell to a. professional soldier to lead them. The world's No. 1 transport airman today is Major General Harold Lee George, boss of the Army Air Forces' burgeoning Air Transport Command.

As his freighters droned toward India, last week, at his desk in ATC's homely headquarters at Washington's Gravelly Point, Hal George watched their progress from radio reports, ran his bright blue eyes over many another operations report -- from New York to Cairo to Chung king, from Nashville across the Pacific to Port Moresby, New Guinea. He also found time to discuss his favorite topic: the limitless sky.

As he spoke, there was a transformation. The quietly efficient officer became the eloquent apostle of air power, for war and peace, voicing his creed and its docu mentation in eager New England ac cents.

Mission for Peace. An aide brought him a message. The White House wanted an itinerary arranged immediately to put Emissary Joseph Davies in Moscow. That would be something more than a routine job, for ATC's scheduled operation runs to the gates of Russia but does not enter.

General George's precisely articulated sentences were scarcely interrupted. He scribbled a note, went on. An hour later the aide reported that all arrangements for the trip had been made.

Two years ago such an assignment would have called for weeks of preparation. That ATC could put it through now with such swift efficiency was the result of many providential circumstances. One of them is that the wide-open spaces of the U.S. had given it the finest domestic and ocean air-transport system in the world.

Revered Vision. Another was that, when the U.S. was pushed into World War II. it was also pushed into the vastest problem of world supply that any nation had ever had to meet. A third was that the vision of aviation's mission in the world, in war and peace, given to Army airmen by the late great Billy Mitchell, was still revered.

By no man had the Mitchell vision been more devoutly cherished or more openly defended than by Harold Lee George. In 1921, when General Mitchell was finally allowed, under smothering restrictions, to test the battle worth of airplanes, young Lieut. George piloted one of the six Martin bombers that sank the ex-German battleship Ostfriesland, and proved to the world that even a dreadnought, under some conditions, was no match for air power. When a court-martial of generals tried Billy Mitchell for insubordination, Hal George was one of his defense witnesses.

Air Transport's Problem. As students of strategy like Harold George have long known, a war is fought primarily by logistics--the. supply and movement of men and materiel. But it is probable that few, if any, of the Army's experts on strategy realized how complicated logistics would become in the global developments of World War II.

Today ATC, big as it is, is still only a skeleton of the vast structure it will become by the end of this year. Its operating lines already vein the world. Its freighter pilots fly along the Alaska highway, past Whitehorse to Fairbanks; its delivery flyers whip fighters and bombers close to Bering Strait to be turned over to Russia for the eastern front. Freighters, and bombers on the way to combat, cross central Canada to Greenland, Iceland, Britain. They blanket the Caribbean and sweep across Mexico. They fly down both sides of South America.

They span the South Atlantic from the "hump" to Africa's west coast, shuttle across equatorial Africa and follow the Nile from Khartoum to Cairo, thence to Saudi Arabia and Karachi. From Cairo they fan out into Trans-Jordan and on to Teheran. From Karachi they reach across India, climb over the Himalayas and thunder across the roof of the world into China.

To the west they regularly make the world's biggest overwater hop--San Francisco to Honolulu, swing southwest by pinpoint navigation through the string of coral dots that lead to New Zealand, to Australia and New Guinea.

New routes are being opened. By the end of 1943, Hal George's Air Transport Command will be ten times as big as the combined airlines of the peacetime world. It will fly nearly three million miles daily, over routes 90,000 miles long. Meanwhile its airmen will fly thousands of hours in the U.S., in the domestic transfer of freight and military aircraft.

Air Transport's Beginning. Three years ago in the embassy at Washington the late Marquess of Lothian, His Britannic Majesty's Ambassador, was asked by a reporter how bombers bought under the cash-&-carry plan could be transported to sorely pressed England. Lord Lothian whispered: "I have been told they might be flown over."

Seaplanes were then flying the oceans, but the North Atlantic was a route to be flown regularly only by veteran pilots. It was deserted by aircraft in the winter. Lord Lothian's whisper was more than the cautious enunciation of a secret. It indicated an awareness of how Billy-Mitchellesque most people would have considered Britain's plan: the regular delivery of military aircraft across the Atlantic, come hell or foul weather, by airmen whose experience was far below the level of transatlantic airline men.

The deliveries were made and by the hundreds. In 1940 the first U.S. aircraft were flown to Canada's border, solemnly wheeled across (to keep neutrality technically inviolate though the world was burning). R.A.F. Ferry Command pilots then took over, flew the planes, with a brief stop in Newfoundland, across to England. Thus Britain was first to shuttle planes, men and freight across the North Atlantic.

Retreat from Neutrality. In June 1941, when the U.S. had decided to relax some of the niceties of,a ruinous neutrality, the U.S. Army set up its own Ferrying Command to deliver bombers to England itself. Its chief: the late Major General Robert Olds, then a colonel.

Most of the early planes carried only their crews and their own spare parts. Soon they were carrying U.S. mail pouches. Then an occasional military passenger hooked a ride. From these casual beginnings came the Army's international air transport. It was not until after Pearl Harbor that men and supplies were regularly carried by air. It was done then because it had to be done.

Pearl Harbor found the U.S. Army with no real air transport beyond its long-starved domestic system (for inter-airdrome deliveries of engines, propellers and other freight). In January 1942, President Roosevelt ordered two squadrons of the 7th Heavy Bombardment Group to Mac-Arthur's relief, via the South Atlantic, Africa and India. To a friend one of the pilots of a 7th Group Liberator wrote: "The total weight of my plane was over 60,000 Ib. [standard maximum, 56,000]. I believe that was the first time an air unit ever moved with all its equipment in its air echelon alone" (i.e., with enough equipment aboard to begin fighting).

Lesson in Defeat. In the early days of the war the Air Ferrying Command grew spasmodically, constantly hamstrung by the demand for combat planes--and the general confusion. What air transport there was in battle zones was done largely by combat pilots in war craft, which were loaded to the last limit of safety. Not until July 1942, when the Air Ferrying Command became Air Transport Command, was there an organized effort to fly cargo regularly over established routes.

Hal George, who had succeeded Olds in

April 1942, took over the new organization and went to work with a broad charter. He knew what he wanted: worldwide operations called for experienced operators. The Army had few, or none. General George turned to a group that had plenty: U.S. airlines.

Airlines' Staff. For his chief of staff George picked a tall Texan who had wrought a wonder of airline organization and operation: 43-year-old Cyrus Rowlett Smith, president of American Airlines (biggest in the U.S.). C. R. Smith put on a colonel's uniform, went to work, has won a brigadier's star for the job he has done.

For the rest of the staff (except for the personnel and administrative boss, Colonel James H. Douglas, Chicago lawyer) George went to the airlines again. Chief of operations is TWA's Larry Fritz (who flew one of the freighters to India last week); chief of domestic transportation and training, Colonel Harold R. Harris, who had organized Pan American Grace (Panagra); United Airlines' Colonel Ray Ireland, chief of priority traffic; Northwest Airlines' Colonel George Gardner, foreign operations; Pan American's Colonel Grant Mason, chief of plans; American Airlines' Lieut. Colonel James G. Flynn, communications.

ATC's wing commanders, the men who run ATC's various theaters of operations, are largely Air Forces career men, but their commands too are liberally salted with many an airline expert in flying, operations, meteorology, airport construction and maintenance.

Airlines' Flyers. Having drafted his executives, Hal George went after the airlines' practical know-how. Today U.S. airlines are flying under contract about 60% of ATC's overseas loads (Army pilots ferry all combat planes).

For the duration the airlines will continue to work for ATC. But ATC is expanding so rapidly that by year's end the airlines' present 60% of overseas freight flying will amount to only 10%. The Army's own airmen will do the rest. They are now being trained by the new Airlines War Training Institute in the flying opera tions procedures that have made U.S. air lines the safest in the world.

Transport's Planes. Air Transport Command is still sadly short of the planes it needs. Beyond the old reliable DC-3, it must largely rely on Liberator bombers, converted to cargo craft and thus long on power and short on freight space. But planes are on the way. Douglas, besides turning out the veteran DC-35, is also producing the C-54, a four-engined mon ster with a payload of ten tons. Curtiss is turning out the powerful two-engined Commando ("Dumbo" to airmen) which made the mass flight to India.

By year's end ATC men expect that 95% of their craft will be planes built for freight hauling. They will have to look farther for the bigger, longer-range craft that aviation must have for the postwar world.

Today ATC has some 50,000 men to fly and service its planes, maintain its far-flung bases, forecast the weather, operate its communications system. In the words of their chief, "All of them are too young and too dumb to know what's impossible, so they do it." They are only the beginning of the force ATC will have by year's end. By then Hal George will, be able to say, with even more conviction than he does now, that ATC will have laid the pattern for something more than winning the war. It will also be a structure for international trade, travel, understanding among nations.

The Great Circle. Even among airline men there are a few who still see no prospect of the air-navigated world en visioned by Billy Mitchell. They are astride a fence that airmen like Harold George have long ago taken in a hurdler's stride.

To the true air-power man, even the great international airlines of today still show evidences of aviation's youthful weaknesses. Because cruising ranges are still relatively short, the lines pursue zig zag courses from terminal to terminal.

But the predictable development of air craft within the next few years will bring longer airways flights.

Planes now going into production will be able to cruise 10,000 miles without stop.

And no man can say how much that range may be lengthened, with new fuel technologies, perhaps even with electronic transmission of power from ground bases -- developments which visionaries like Hal George think completely possible.

When the day of the 10,000-mile plane has fully dawned, aircraft can hop from continent deep into continent. Then the world's airways, over the great circle (shortest) courses, will lie largely across the top of the world, may reach, too, across the Antarctic to the more thinly populated areas of the Southern Hemisphere.

Dream No Longer. To ATCmen such routes are no longer dreams. For months ATC has operated in the worst weather of the north subpolar country, has made operation routine. And no north-route flyer smiles as General George foretells the day when Americans may stop over on world trips in hotels on the Arctic icecaps, or make one-week round-trip business runs to Calcutta, Moscow or Chungking.

Qualified Freedom. So far as airmen are concerned, only one thing can thwart such dreams. It is not the problem of economy of operation, which has been handsomely met already. It is not freight or passenger capacity or comfort. The barrier, if there is one, is in the mind and heart of the world.

To travel the world, and to give transportation the chance to revivify the U.S. as it has done after two other great wars (railroads in the '70s, the automobile after World War I), U.S. aircraft must have the right of passage over the nations of the world, and of landing on their airports. The U.S. must give the same privileges to other nations.

Few airmen believe that such rights should be unrestricted. They see in com plete freedom of the air a great threat to weak countries, through surprise bombing raids over well-scouted territory. But they admit no reason why the nations cannot agree upon limited rights to foreign air lines which will tie the world closer than it has ever been before in trade, and there fore in understanding.

Each nation has plenty of bargaining power in the sovereignty it exercises over its own territory. Most of the great-circle routes from the U.S. to the world's biggest trade centers, for example, pass over Can ada. Many of them pass over China, Rus sia, India. And landing rights for all the world are needed in the smaller countries like Sweden, Belgium, Holland, British Malaya. Egypt -- all the places in the world where there is trade, or where trade might be.

To make these arrangements is a problem for diplomats who will have to juggle many intangibles, balance such considerations as the fact that, while the U.S. now has the world's best equipment and the most know-how in worldwide transportation, the other nations still have the bases, still own the air above them.

But to airmen these are details, and details can be worked out. Occupationally impatient, young, and full of the vision of their new world, they wave before diplomats an Air Forces boast: "The difficult we do at once: the impossible takes a little longer."

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