Airbaloney

Did somebody slip Mr. C. Bedall Monro, Pennsylvania-Central Airline president, a marijuana cigaret?

Two weeks ago Monro publicly and bitterly denounced his industry for making fantastic promises of postwar service. He called such boasts a "vision of the marijuana type." But by last week P.C.A. itself held top honors in the race among smaller U.S. airlines for sensational prophecy. In full-page newspaper advertisements P.C.A. announced that it had filed with the Civil Aeronautics Board an application for a transatlantic air route to Europe, using gigantic floating seadromes (cost, $10 million each; inventor, Edward R. Armstrong), spaced at 800-mile intervals as sea-based refueling stations.

Monro was on safer ground in his speech-making than in his advertising. The latter placed him in a class with many small operators wildly staking out claims for routes to Moscow, to Singapore, to Calcutta; for helicopter networks (one filed with CAB by an 18-year-old high-school boy), and other ventures that are no longer impossible but are still no more than dreams.

CAB will not act upon any of these applications until the war is won. In the meantime the big domestic operators (Transcontinental & Western, Eastern Air, American Air and United Air) are piling up actual transoceanic experience flying military routes around the world. Some day they will be making a few applications of their own.

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