Down to Earth

No dour railroad man, no old-line ship operator, but shrewd, realistic, ultra-air-minded William Allan Patterson, President of United Air Lines, rose up last week to say that a lot of talk about the future of the airplane is hot air.

Peppery Mr. Patterson told the Namal Industrial Conference Board that the post-war airplane will not put older slower transportation forms out of business. This assertion collides head on with Grover Loening's breezy statement last May that 45,000 planes of the bomber type that Henry Ford is building could handle the 500 billion ton-miles of freight carried last year by the railroads.

But Patterson, with United's research department and years of experience with freight traffic behind him, comes up with a different set of figures. Not 45,000 planes, says he, but a fantastic 600,000. Any such fleet would need 2.5 million pilots, a total airline personnel of 20,000,000, plus 122 billion gallons of gasoline per year--two and one-half times the world's pre-war gasoline cracking capacity.

The factors that Patterson's seasoned traffic experts have considered and others must have overlooked are:

1) the nation's freight traffic has seasonal peaks;

2) there is an unbalance in directional flow with most U.S. tonnage moving from West to East, from South to North;

3) the greatest volume is shorthaul with overnight delivery possible by surface transport;

4) terminal and handling costs are equal to or greater than over-the-line costs, are hard to reduce;

5) even more important, speed in delivery is relatively unimportant for probably 90% of all freight.

To illustrate air v. ground-carriers' problems Patterson cited two examples:

1) The average freight train between Chicago and San Francisco makes two round trips per month, delivers 1,560 tons of freight each way. The round trip operating cost is $50,000, the locomotive consumes 170,000 gallons of oil, the train crew numbers 20. To move the same tonnage by air would call for 626 airplane round trips (2.5 million air miles v. 8,880 train miles) by 57 airplanes. Gasoline consumption would be 1.5 million gallons, pilots needed, 400, total operating costs $1.75 million.

2) An average ship from San Francisco to Brisbane hauls 13,000 tons of cargo per round trip, needs a crew of 55, consumes 425,000 gallons of oil, and the operating cost is $120,000. If planes hauled the same cargo, it would take 3,500 crew men, 18,000,000 gallons of gasoline, and cost $29,000,000.

These figures are based on today's costs and airplanes. Said Patterson: "There is still much uncertainty as to the cost of operating the giant airliners projected for the future." The most optimistic figures after considering a 100% increase in traffic and all known airplane improvements, is a freight rate of 10-c- per ton-mile. This is some 60% under present charges, but above the 9 1/3 mills per ton-mile for rail freight and about 1 1/2 mills for steamer.

More cheering to aviation enthusiasts was Patterson's belief that the air lines will be kept busy pioneering new commercial routes, that they have a whole unexplored new world to conquer where transportation is inadequate.

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