Rich Cargo

When he heard the glad news, Slick Airways' President Earl F. Slick took some employees out to his ranch near San Antonio for a big barbecue. In Los Angeles, the Flying Tiger Line's President Robert W. Prescott, 35, was equally elated. Said he: "We have finally dropped the curse of the unwashed."

All the joy was caused by a historic decision of the Civil Aeronautics Board. Last week, CAB gave the two big nonscheduled cargo airlines permission to fly two transcontinental scheduled air-freight routes, the first in the U.S. CAB's certificates will permit them to fly on regular, advertised schedules, thus compete for air freight on equal terms with the regular airlines. At the same time CAB: 1) certificated Florida's U.S. Airlines, Inc. to fly a north-south freight route between the New York and Chicago areas and the southeast; 2) approved a local newspaper-delivery route flown by Texas' Airnews, Inc.

Overnight, the decision made potentially big businesses of Slick Airways and the Flying Tiger Line, which are among the strongest survivors of all the shoestring lines that scudded across U.S. skies at war's end. But neither 28-year-old Earl Slick nor Bob Prescott let it take his breath away.

Slick, who had already spent $3,000,000 on the airline (mostly from his and brother Tom's oil-inherited wealth), planned to get along at first with his present fleet of 21 Curtiss (C-46) Commandos, in spite of the fact that the schedule boosts his route from the twelve cities he now serves to 54. Slick's route begins in Los Angeles, runs through Texas to Kansas City, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Louisville and on to Philadelphia, New York and Boston. Said he: "We will expand as we find it necessary. We're not going to go hogwild."

The Flying Tiger's route runs from California to the Pacific Northwest, then to the Twin Cities, Des Moines, Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, New York and north into Maine. Prescott also intended to carry on, for the time being, with his six DC-4s and three C-47s. "The decision gives me a lot of new markets," he said, "but I've got to test them to see if they will be profitable."

The chances for profit looked good. In three years, air freight has grown from virtually nothing to more than 115 million ton-miles last year. The potential amount of U.S. air freight, said CAB last week, is more than one billion ton-miles per year, or more than eight times as much as all airlines are now hauling. The cargo lines had promised they would develop the business if given the chance. Now it was up to them to make good.

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