Atlantic Challenge

For the rich, postwar plum of passengers and freight traffic across the North Atlantic to Europe, American Airlines, biggest U.S. domestic line, last week reached out a powerful hand. American filed its application with CAB for two North Atlantic routes: 1) from New York and Boston to London, 2) from Chicago and Detroit to London.

American's grey-haired, heavy-set president, Alexander Nesbitt Kemp is well aware that his company's action signifies more than ambitious appetite. Two months ago, American and 15 other domestic lines trumpeted a policy of free postwar competition, signed an agreement to implement it. Pan American Airways and American Export Airlines, which now fly the North Atlantic, did not sign. Pan Am fears the results of a wholesale postwar competitive scramble among U.S. airlines while foreign countries operate through a government-backed "chosen instrument." Export has said nothing. American is the first of the big lines to challenge the nonsigners in their own bailiwick.

There was plenty of other evidence that U.S. airlines were turning propellers, warming motors for the shining postwar future of international air traffic:

> Stockholders of Braniff Airways, Inc., now the fifth largest U.S. domestic airline (in passenger miles flown), authorized an increase in common stock from 400,000 shares of $2.50 par value to 1.500,000. The new capital (estimated at $5,000,000 at the offering price of $12.75) is to be used to finance projected domestic expansion and postwar global flying.

> Northwest Airlines is also contemplating new financing, to get funds to operate the world-straddling routes it applied for a fortnight ago. Northwest wants to fly from Seattle by way of the Aleutians to Tokyo, Shanghai, Chungking, Calcutta.

> Pan American drafted a tentative postwar schedule of prices to titillate globe-hoppers. Its figures are below the rates of prewar first-class steamship travel:

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