Pegasus a la Francaise

At Paris' bustling Orly Airport last week, a bulletin board flashed departures to every corner of the globe--Casablanca, Mexico City, Prague, London, New York, Stockholm, Istanbul, Buenos Aires, Tokyo. All planes bore the winged sea-horse insigne of Air France, Europe's biggest and the world's longest airline. Frenchmen could claim with pride that it is also one of the world's most modern. Last week France's international airline was betting some $143 million on a new jet fleet, the biggest outside the U.S. On order were twelve French-built twin-jet Caravelle transports for European runs, plus ten U.S. Boeing 707 intercontinental jet liners slated for 1959 service on the most competitive of all air routes, the rich North Atlantic run.

On its record, Air France should thrive on the competition. In the postwar scramble for business, Air France has fought its way up until it now flies 38% of the transatlantic traffic to Paris (some 300,000 passengers annually). Yet the North Atlantic is only a small fraction of Air France's booming business. With a fleet of 121 planes taking off at the rate of one every four minutes around the world, the line flies 156,000 miles of routes to 73 countries and territories, and is growing bigger by the year. In 1955 alone, it carried nearly 2,000,000 passengers, 20% more than in 1954, and brought in an income of more than $130 million, $43 million of it in foreign currency to help balance France's troublesome trade gap.

Goliath and the Bike-Racer. A descendant of the original French aeronauts who bounced from Paris to London in a converted 75-m.p.h. Farman "Goliath" bomber after World War I, Air France was formed in 1933 from five struggling companies. Frenchmen had already pioneered commercial routes through Europe and Africa, flown mail over South American jungles in convoys of three chattering airplanes in order, as one pilot put it, to be sure that "at least one would arrive." The Depression and cutthroat competition forced the small French lines to band together as Air France, 25% government-owned. By 1939 Air France was flying 40,420 miles of world routes. Then World War II smashed the line, wrecked its planes and scattered its personnel.

Air France's postwar comeback is largely the work of a burly Frenchman with a booming laugh and a bike-racer's stamina: Board Chairman Max Hymans, 55, a native Parisian who was successively an engineer, patent attorney, politician, and resistance leader before signing on as Free

France's wartime air-transport chief. He landed in France as soon as Paris was liberated, and by V-E day had Air France back in business. A year later, the line was flying 68 scheduled routes with DC-3s and other war-weary craft.

Chopsticks & Champagne. To expand and modernize the line, Hymans spent $53 million on new Lockheed Constellations. Vickers Viscount turboprops, lumbering Breguet transports for 106-passenger coach flights. He and his operating chiefs are fanatics on safety, have suffered no fatal crashes since 1953. All Air France's first pilots are million-mile men, are paid up to $15,400 a year (more than the President of the Republic). Every mechanic is winnowed through a special four-year course, gets three more years of on-the-job training.

Air France travelers are treated with true Gallic grace, and the stewards provide something for everybody -- straw slippers and chopsticks on flights to Japan, kosher and Moslem diets for Near East travelers, fine and fattening French foods on the blue-ribbon routes. Last year alone, Air France served 500,000 bottles of wine aloft, including champagne, provided on request in lieu of breakfast orange juice on some de luxe runs.

Air France's biggest postwar achievement has been to open vast new areas of the world to the 20th century. Since 1945, Air France has laid out a network of 111 stops in West Africa, Equatorial Africa and Madagascar. Long-isolated areas such as Mauritania (pop. 793 whites, 545,000 natives), Lake Chad, the Cameroons, are now within 18 hours of Paris and do a fast-growing business in pineapples, cotton and beef, all flown out by Air France.

Ahead of the Future. The expansion is costly, and Air France still needs more than $4,000,000 annual subsidy from the French government. Where U.S. overseas airlines shuttle back and forth as many as 6,000 times annually on generally shorter, high-density runs, Air France averages only 230 trips on its long routes. But with the new jet age of 600-m.p.h. flight, Chairman Hymans hopes to make the big planes on the rich runs pay the cost of the less active routes. Behind his desk in Paris, a huge world map has been repainted time and again to keep up with all the new routes, yet it is still out of date.

Says Hymans: "The main thing is to keep Air France up to date. To keep ahead of competition in the air, you must keep ahead of the future."

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