New Policy for MATS

The commercial airlines, with a big assist from Oklahoma's Democratic Senator A. S. ("Mike") Monroney, last week won their long battle to force the Military Air Transport Service to stop competing for passengers and cargo. In the future, MATS will function only as a "hard core" carrier transporting troops, weapons and missiles for the armed forces. This policy shift will force MATS to surrender the bulk of its military and VIP Government passenger and freight business to the private airlines, which will amount to an estimated $100 million a year.

Monroney campaigned to reorient MATS not only to stop it from muscling in on the airlines but to improve its damaged military effectiveness. He charged that obsolescence had all but crippled MATS' 455-plane air fleet; two months ago MATS was forced to ground all its Wright Turbo Compound-powered Constellations because of maintenance problems, and it has kept its C124 Globe-masters in service only by cannibalizing disabled ships. MATS is in such sad shape that it will have to charter several dozen commercial aircraft for the airlift of 20,000 soldiers to next month's Army maneuvers in Puerto Rico and to fill holes left in the regular MATS system by diverting MATS planes to the maneuvers.

By getting MATS out of the hair of the private airlines, Monroney figured Congress will re-equip it, okay development of a new U.S. cargo plane jointly sponsored by the Government and private airframe manufacturers. Says he: "I don't care whether it's pure jet or turbine propeller. In the kind of brush war businesses that may be ahead, we want a large capacity aircraft that will operate in and out of short fields." Such a cargo plane would be equally useful to commercial carriers. But Congress would not okay appropriations for such a plane until MATS was no longer directly competitive with the private airlines. It was almost impossible for MATS to get any new equipment of any kind. Last year the House shot down a $66 million item that MATS tried to tack on its budget for the purchase of ten DC-8 jets.

To win his battle, Monroney enlisted a powerhouse of support: the National Security Council, Air Force Secretary Dudley C. Sharpe, Federal Aviation Agency Administrator Elwood R. Quesada (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), and the White House. MATS did not yield without a fight. Even in the face of official Air Force approval, it still has its diehard advocates of military competition with business. But at week's end, the word had gone out from the Air Force's vice chief of staff, General Curtis LeMay, to MATS officers that they must support the new policy.

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