Presidential Error

President Eisenhower got caught in the propwash of an airline battle last week. As a result, he came within an ace of knocking Northwest Airlines off one of its most prized routes. The dogfight was between Northwest and Pan American World Airways over which should fly the Pacific between Seattle-Portland and Hawaii, a profitable run that both have been operating on a temporary basis since 1948. The Civil Aeronautics Board finally reached a unanimous decision: Northwest should have the route alone. But when the CAB recommendation went to the White House a fortnight ago, it ran into opposition.

Commerce Secretary Sinclair Weeks, under whose department CAB operates, advised the President to reverse the CAB decision, drop Northwest and give the route exclusively to Pan American. Pan American has lower Government subsidies than Northwest, and in the past two years carried more passengers to Hawaii --18,192 to 11,671 for Northwest. The President, who is interested in saving money on airline subsidies, decided to reverse CAB and signed a letter giving the route to Pan American alone.

In the uproar that followed, the President soon learned that there was a lot more to the case. Northwest's scrappy, 42-year-old President Don Nyrop flew to Washington. A onetime CAB chairman who knows his way around the Capitol, Nyrop got Minnesota's Republican Senator Edward Thye to call on the President with a new sheaf of facts and figures supplied by Nyrop and CAB's Acting Chairman Chan Gurney. Pan Am had indeed led in passengers for the last two years, but most of its bulge came in 1953, when plane-short Northwest had to shift its Boeing Stratocruisers from the Pacific to domestic and Orient runs and fly DC-4s to Hawaii. In 1954 Northwest made up most of the loss, ran almost neck and neck with Pan Am. Over the entire six-year test period, Northwest was the real leader, having flown 31,038 passengers to Pan Am's 30,700. As for subsidies, Northwest had previously said that it would fly the route without Government subsidy, expected to be self-supporting by 1956. From other sources Ike also got a quick inkling that his decision against Northwest was highly unpopular in Minnesota and the Northwest, with Democrats ready to capitalize on it.

Last week Ike fired off a new letter to CAB. reversing himself and giving back Northwest its Honolulu run for three more years, in competition with Pan American. At his press conference, Ike said bluntly that he had "made an error." Said Minnesota's Thye: "As soon as he got the facts, he changed his decision."

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