According to some figures I have received, half of the men who subscribe to TIME have flown at least 5,000 miles apiece via passenger airline; 30% make from one to 50 trips a year by air; their total passenger miles logged to date is better than three billion. That, as one of our statisticians has been moved to compute, is a little over 6,000 round trips to the moon.

In turn, you may be interested in TIME Inc.'s own use of the airplane in covering the news, in conducting other aspects of our business, and in distributing our magazines. Figures for the last are astronomical and can be taken for granted. Figures for the former add up to about two million air miles during the first half of this year.

One explanation of this sizeable total is suggested by a recent dispatch from Robert Sherrod, TIME'S senior correspondent in the Pacific, which began: "As I was saying, before I was interrupted by an 8,000-mile air trip. . . ."Sherrod had hurried to New Zealand from his base in China to cover a spot news story and, returning, had resumed the interrupted background piece he had been writing.

Another explanation is in Edgar Baker's account of his round-the-world flight (48,000 miles) as manager of TIME-LIFE International's overseas editions, in which he covered 15,000 miles by air within the borders of India alone. The rest is a multiplication of these news and business activities at home in the U.S. and overseas--plus the convenience of air travel for getting our editors away frequently to see the rest of the world they write about, and getting correspondents home for personal consultation on critical issues in the news.

It is in the Middle East, the Far East, and, to some extent, Latin America, that postwar air travel has become indispensable to TIME'S news operations. Our Cairo bureau, for instance, figures that it has a million square miles of territory to operate in. Its correspondents can cover Palestine, Lebanon and Syria by automobile; the rest is swiftly accessible only by plane. But when proof was needed of the Russian evacuation of the Iranian province of Azerbaijan, a bureau correspondent hopped into a plane flown by the American Embassy's air attache, an ex-fighter pilot, in order to see the Russian troop convoys pulling away northward from Tabriz.

That sort of news gathering would be almost routine to our correspondents in China. China is so big, its rail and road facilities so limited, that the news cannot be covered adequately without air travel. So far this year our bureaumen there have logged 61,000 air miles under, to say the least, Spartan conditions. Generally, they have to ride strapped to bucket seats and hounded by cargoes of currency, munitions, gasoline, melons, bedding, furs, mail, pork, wheat, etc. roped roof-high down the middle aisle. It gives you, they claim, that "living-on-borrowed-time feeling." Shanghai Bureau Chief William Gray has a cogent explanation of what it is like:

"Last June, 40 sheep and I had a memorable trip en route to Taiyuan in a transport plane. Twice I helped the co-pilot herd the sheep out of the plane's tail after they had jumped the rear fence of their bamboo corral and made the plane tail-heavy. When I told the pilot what had happened, he mused: 'I wondered why this damned airplane was dragging.'

"Continuing to Taiyuan in a second transport, an old C-47 with a load of flour for an isolated city, I had to toss flour sacks for ten minutes after a third of the cargo slid into the tail on the takeoff. On that same flight the pilot asked me if I had ever flown an airplane. I said I had tried to fly a Cub. He gave me rudimentary oral instruction ('It's just like driving an automobile'), got up and left me alone at the plane's controls while he and the co-pilot juggled flour sacks again. On the way out he advised: 'call me if there's any engine trouble.' This is true, so help me."

Cordially, James A. Linen

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