On Schedule

In winter the North Atlantic airway to Europe is no "milk run." Hurricane winds blow over desolate wastes of water. The bases are often closed in by sudden storms. Moisture-laden air can sheathe a plane in ice. With magnificent understatement, airmen used to say the route was "unreliable."

But this week the Air Transport Command's North Atlantic division, in ceremonies at bases from Maine to Iceland, will mark the opening of its second winter of regularly scheduled operations. A flight to Europe, winter or summer, is now as routine an operation as a hop from New York to San Francisco.

He Proved His Point. The man who runs this airway is tough, gruff Brigadier General Lawrence G. Fritz, onetime operations vice president for the T.W.A. When he was A.T.C.'s operations chief in Washington, he used to assert: "The North Atlantic . . . can be flown both east and west on regular schedule in winter as well as summer."

One day in the fall of 1942 he stepped into a B24, flew it out into the North Atlantic seeking the worst weather "front" that he could find. His plane picked up a load of ice, lost flying speed and dropped into a spin. Fritz, a veteran airline pilot, straightened her out just a few hundred feet from the water. He came back still convinced that he was right. He was handed the job of proving his point as C.O. of the North Atlantic Division.

In the winter of 1943-44 the division flew more traffic over the Atlantic than in the whole summer of 1942. Traffic is up to more than 40 crossings a day. Last month more passengers, cargo and mail moved over the Army's North Atlantic run than during any month last summer (except during the period immediately before and after the invasion).

The Lonely Men. Larry Fritz was too old and too precise a hand to try to beat the North Atlantic by pounding across by guess and by God.

The weather hazard was beaten by establishing a huge network with alternate fields for emergencies. Weather stations were set up--53 of them--and radio communications were installed to get their observations to the forecasters. The network is operated by officers who learned their job in the operations end of the U.S. airlines. The stations are manned by thousands of G.I.s.

Their reports, radioed from barren rocks and cliffside perches, now enable the "weather busters" of the A.T.C. to forecast the weather across the North Atlantic mile by mile, almost hour by hour. The communications network, radio ranges and home beacons shepherd the transports and the bombers across. The great bases at Labrador, Newfoundland, Greenland, Iceland and the Azores provide refueling, maintenance and sometimes havens.

Crossroads of the Atlantic. On the North Atlantic division the A.T.C. is doing two jobs: 1) maintaining and flying the transport route to Europe for high priority passengers, mail and freight; 2) guiding the fleets of bombers direct into the European theater.

The main route for the transports--four-engined Douglas C-54s-- has two European terminals, Prestwick (Scotland) and Paris". Its main divisional point outside the U.S. on this side is Harmon Field at Stephenville, on the extreme western edge of Newfoundland. Here the C-54s change crews, refuel and are checked again before they hop the Atlantic either direct, or via Iceland or the Azores, depending on the weather. Harmon is the true crossroad of the Atlantic today.

On the Great Circle. Combat planes are nursed across the Atlantic north of the main transport lines. Their divisional points are the bases at Goose Bay and Gander Field, which the A.T.C. shares with the Canadians and the British. The planes, mainly B-17s and B-24s, are flown direct by their tactical crews.

They are sent northward over the Great Circle because it is shorter and because they can use the bases in North Canada and Greenland in case of trouble. Today the Canada bases--Crystals 1 and 2--are largely weather outposts and standby stations. But the Greenland bases, B.W. 8 and 1, and B.E. 2, are there as life rafts. The B is army code for Bluie. G.I.s disagree on its origin. One version is that it is short for Bluenose, the other that it was named after the color of the old sea ice at the base of the icebergs.

"Don't Count on My Return." Many of the airmen who fly over the ice cap on the way from Goose and Gander to Iceland have never seen a mountain nor flown an ocean when they set out. They go into the briefing room with the mark of the Texas sun still on their bright brown eager faces. They listen to the operations officer, see a motion picture that gives them a vivid pilot's-eye view of their course. Then they depart.

Occasionally they fail to make it. A while back a Liberator pilot, well on his way to Iceland and past "the point of no return" on his chart, suddenly turned back toward Goose again. From Greenland an operations officer talked with him by radio, tried to persuade him to come into B.W. 1. The boy still headed for Goose and there they heard his last calm message: "Don't count on my return. Am running short of gas."

He was the exception. Out of thousands of tactical craft that have been flown to Europe this year, less than .2 percent have been lost.

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