Foot in the Door

Famed K.L.M., Royal Dutch Air Lines, the world's oldest international flyer (1920), last week added another first to its long pioneering history.

At Miami's 36th Street airport, a K.L.M. Lockheed Super-Electra landed ten passengers, 25,000 first-flight "covers" for stamp collectors, eight hours and 44 minutes after taking off from Curacao. It was the first scheduled Caribbean-U.S. flight ever made by a commercial plane that did not belong to Pan American Airways.

For eight years K.L.M. has had a network centered around the oil-rich Dutch islands of Curaco and Aruba. Before the war, this 2,400-mile route from nowhere to nowhere was a minor part of K.L.M. 's 15,800-mile worldwide bailiwick -- and K.L.M. had no U.S. license to fly between the Dutch Indies and the U.S.

But last May, with more Caribbean air routes vitally needed, CAB relented, gave K.L.M. and four other lines (all small, all foreign) permission to land at Miami.* Big K.L.M., with all its other regular flights canceled by war in Europe and the Far East, was first to rush in with alternate flights via Jamaica and Haiti.

The new Miami permits are all limited to a period not longer than six months after war ends, are thus not yet a permanent threat to Pan Am. But U.S. airmen, eying the map (see cut), wondered if K.L.M.,'s big foot, now firmly stuck in Pan Am's back door for the duration, would not open up the Caribbean once & for all.

*Two U.S. lines, also anxious to fly the Caribbean, were left out in the cold because all their planes were even more desperately needed on continental schedules.

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