"Travesty"

U. S. airlines are in much the same position as adolescent children of divorced parents. By the terms of the divorce (the Air Mail Act of 1934, passed after the celebrated Farley-Roosevelt airmail cancelation), "Mother" Interstate Commerce Commission has "influence," some jurisdiction. But "Father" Post Office--by control of the airmail subsidy--has the whip-hand. "Mother" I.C.C. would like to let the growing business expand in healthy exuberance. "Father" Post Office, remembering the airmail scandal, treats the airlines like boys in a reform school.

This situation has resulted in freezing the lines in practically the same status they found themselves in when the Air Mail Act of 1934 was passed. Though there are many places in the U. S. where extension of routes would benefit both nation and airlines, such expansions have almost always been forbidden. Sample case was the rejection two months ago of Transcontinental & Western Air's application to inaugurate useful service between Albuquerque and San Francisco (TIME, March 22). Last week American Airlines was similarly forbidden to inaugurate service between Detroit and Cincinnati and between Detroit and Indianapolis via Fort Wayne. The Air Mail Act prohibits a new service which might compete with an established one, even if the public's best interests might thus be served.

To improve this awkward arrangement, no less than seven bills were introduced in the present Congress. Two have now merged into the McCarran-Lea Bill which would put the airlines almost entirely under the non-political jurisdiction of the I.C.C. This bill emerged from committee last week and is soon to face a vote. Few sincerely airminded persons in the U. S. oppose it. The Air Line Pilots' Association unanimously voted in favor of I.C.C. jurisdiction; all the airlines devoutly hope the McCarran-Lea Bill will pass. They have, however, been slow to say so because they fear offending the potent Post Office, which also has a bill in Congress--the Mead Bill giving it even greater power over aviation than it has now.

This legal rivalry has smoldered for months in Washington. To oppose the McCarran-Lea Bill, the Post Office has lately softened its harsh attitude toward the lines, gone out of its way to give them what they asked. Example was permission to United Air Lines last month to fly into Denver (TIME, May 10). To make this new service jibe with the Air Mail Act, Solicitor Karl A. Crowley had to devise a totally new concept--that an airline is a "zone of influence" instead of a geometric line. Last week Post Office men in Washington revealed that they will soon advertise for bids for a number of important new airmail routes, one of which is the flight from Winslow to San Francisco that was denied to TWA only two months ago.* Almost every airline in the U. S. is seriously affected by these proposed new routes and airline officers last week freely predicted that the scramble for contracts would rival the furor caused by the 1934 cancelations. How most of them feel was expressed in an editorial in a new magazine named American Aviation whose first issue appeared last week./- Excerpt:

"The Post Office opposition is no mystery. A politician has to have in his bag of tricks a group of favorites. In the present situation the airlines are one of the pawns. Political groups must pay communities off in the cheapest coin necessary. Air mail is one way of paying political debts. . . . Only the other day some ebullient Congressman introduced a bill to set aside May 28 as 'Aviation Day.' What a travesty!"

*Others in order of probability: Washington to Buffalo via Baltimore and Harrisburg; Jacksonville to Mobile via Tallahassee; Pittsburgh to Chicago via Dayton; Houston to Corpus Christi; Huron, S. Dak. to Cheyenne; Denver to Kansas City, Memphis and Birmingham.

/-An informative, slick-paper bi-monthly selling for $3 a year, edited by outspoken Wayne W. Parrish, onetime editor of National Aeronautics Magazine. Co-publishers with him are the Stackpole Brothers (Major Albert Hummel and General Edward James), publishers of the 104-year-old Harrisburg (Pa.) Telegraph.

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