Flare-Up in Washington

Pan American Airways, pioneer on the international airways, was in a mood for fighting last week. In Washington, it chucked an indignant brief onto the Civil Aeronautics Board desk. Its charge: gross Government favoritism in granting Transcontinental & Western Air, Inc. and American Airlines, Inc. postwar transatlantic routes. The protest was polite, but by mentioning Plane-Builder Howard Hughes, it left the door ajar enough to drag in T.W.A.'s president, jowly, hard-flying Jack Frye, and his friend, Brigadier General Elliott Roosevelt.

Hughes, who divides his time and money between films, tool making, a brewery, flying and financing, owns about 45% of T.W.A. stock. Pan Am, with impish innocence, reminded the CAB of this. By nightfall, Washington remembered that Frye was best man when Elliott Roosevelt married Cinemactress Faye Emerson on the Grand Canyon rim last December. Hollywood instantly recalled that Elliott met Faye through Johnny Meyer, a talent scout and handy man for Hughes. All this occurred while Franklin Roosevelt was in the White House, and before the CAB had ruled on the T.W.A. applications.

For Elliott, this was an attack from an unexpected quarter. He had just answered the critics of his financial manipulations (TIME, June 25). He had denied his father had ever "promoted or assisted" his private affairs, branded such a charge as "a deliberate, infamous lie." To the new charge that he had helped T.W.A. get a choice postwar plum-- a charge trumpeted on the floor of Congress by Michigan's Paul Shafer -- he was mum.

Through all the hullabaloo, one fact was clear: the CAB had by no means settled everything by its rejection of the "chosen instrument" plan for postwar U.S.aviation. The airlines, urged by CAB to compete with each other, were not only competing, but also fighting (see below). They would probably go on doing so until Congress passed the definitive word. Sound airmen hoped it would waste no time when it sat down to work again.

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