Half a Million Planes

"Before 1950," said an OWI report on air transport this week, "the United States may well have half a million private, commercial and military planes in active service." The report added that "this may seem like a lot" (it is 1,152 times the peak number of planes that all U.S. air lines operated at home and abroad before the war). Other OWI statistics on air transport :

P:Aircraft production this year will amount to $20.1 billion-- one-fourth of the entire U.S. war budget, one-seventh of the U.S. national income. Next year, production is supposed to be 55% higher than that.

P: At the moment "not a single plane originally conceived solely to carry cargo is in service in the Western Hemisphere," but one-quarter of all the two-and four-engined planes scheduled for production this year will be cargo transports. By 1945, transports weighing from 100,000 to 120,000 Ib. will be "flying in quantity." Their ton-mile capacity will be ten times that of today's "work horse of the airlines," the 25,200-lb. Douglas DC-3.

P:In addition to the 2,500,000 men and women already building planes, by year's end there will be more than 3,000,000 trained pilots, navigators, airport workers, etc.--an air-minded nucleus bound to give postwar aviation a tremendous forward thrust.

OWI took a hard crack at "extravagant" claims that any number of planes could absorb most of the land & sea transport business after the war. OWI argued sensibly that the more planes there are the more ships, trucks and railroad cars will be needed to fuel and supply them. According to Civil Aeronautics Administrator Charles I. Stanton, more than two 10,000-ton tanker loads of gasoline would be needed to refuel enough Clipper trips from New York to England to carry the cargo that one 10,000-ton freighter could take across in a single voyage.

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