Oversold

In Manhattan's Hotel Astor last week, the Institute of the Aeronautical Sciences gathered for its 15th annual honors night. But what the experts heard from the principal speaker was in no way akin to an honor. Said Secretary of Commerce W. Averell Harriman: "The public has been oversold on the present status of aviation. The air age is not yet at hand."

The squalls now buffeting commercial aviation, said Harriman, were caused by bad advertising and public relations. The promotion of future planes and future services, said he, have given the public an "exaggerated" picture of aviation's advantages without "a thorough understanding of its limitations." As a result, even "the fact that the mileage of scheduled airlines has gone up while the accident rate has declined substantially does not register."*

If any airman chose to ignore Harriman and the fact that there has been a serious drop in airlines travel,/- there were plenty of other symptoms last week that the aviation industry was far from healthy. Some of them:

P: Pennsylvania-Central Airlines Corp., which lost $2,500,000 in 1946, said that it stands to lose an equal amount in the first half of 1947. Unless rates are raised, said President C. Bedell Monro, most of the airlines will be in the same trouble.

P: Northeast Airlines asked CAB for a $1,400,000 retroactive increase in mail rates. Unless this is granted, Northeast said that its survival was "a matter of grave doubt."

P: Piper Aircraft Corp.'s President W. T. Piper confessed that "fantastic" estimates of demand had led the personal-plane industry to overproduce. Last year more personal planes were made than in the 15 years preceding the war. This saturating production had sent most manufacturers into a tailspin.

* It did with the Institute of Life Insurance. It announced that, due to the decline in fatality rates on scheduled airlines (1.2 per 100,000,000 passenger miles in 1946 v. 2.1 in 1945), 98% of life insurance companies--11% more than last year--now issue policies to air travelers at standard rates.

/- At week's end came more bad news: an Air France DC-3 crashed into a peak as it approached the Lisbon airport, killed 16.

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