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Show 'tODAVl i and YTOMORROWl franpbrker I PLANKS new Thirty-five years ago tho very first airplane to carry a man in I flight got Into the air. The Wright Brothers kept their experiments so secret that the public never saw a plane in flight until 1908, when Glenn Curtiss flew at Hain-mondsport Hain-mondsport In a machine of his own design. The first plane I ever saw was Curtiss' flight from Albany Al-bany to New York in 1909. That's ; how new the airplane is. ' It's so new that mankind has only just begun to realize its possibilities. Military men, when are slow to learn anything any-thing new anyway, laughed 55 at Col. Lindbergh when he told the world a couple of j years ago that Germany, was J. creating a military air fleet . superior to any in the world. Xow we have learned how dreadfully true his warning was. Planes give nations mastery mas-tery in war. Though Americans taught the r. world how to fly, we have been far behind other nations in the development of fighting planes. ! FORD builder When the President told Congress Con-gress that we ought to be prepared to build 50,000 fighting planes a year many people said it could not be done. A few days later r Henry Ford said he'd undertake to 1 build a thousand planes a day, " given six months time to tool up. I Army had fewer thnn 2(K) airplanes, air-planes, all obsolete, underen-glned, underen-glned, and liiuirincd. The Germans, Ger-mans, British, IVench nnd Kalians had good, modern pianos and were making good use of them. We liad to send officers to the front, to find out what kind of planes we needed before we could start to build them. We got going fast on the Liberty Liber-ty motors and sent a lot of them to France to use on French planes! Before the Armistice we had a good many American planes in France still in crates. I believe I am right In saying that not a jingle American airplane got into action before the war was over. Our aviators flew planes of British Bri-tish and French manufacture which we bought IMPKOVEMEXTS . . . many The airplane of today is as different dif-ferent from any that were used in the World War of 1914-18 as the V-8 car is from the Model T. It is faster, therefore necessarily stronger, and for most purposes is larger by far. It costs many times more than the best planes made twenty years ago. But those tare no reasons why planes can't be made rapidly. One German trick that might well be adopted is to equip only one plane in ten or so with the instruments need- ed for "blind" flying. They send their fighting planes out in squadrons of ten, nine of them merely following the lead plane. At least, that is what a flying expert who has been over there told me, and it sounds reasonable. The greatest development of commercial aviation has been in the United States, and it has been due largely to the American development de-velopment of instruments to insure in-sure safety and guide the pilot. Lindbergh's flight from New York to Paris by aid of instruments really started modern commercial flying. For the first time, the public pub-lic was convinced that it was safe to fly. PROPHECY useless Anyone who undertakes to predict pre-dict the future is sticking his neck out, so I don't pretend to be a prophet. So many unexpected things can happen to make any prophecy go wrong. I have just been re-reading one of the greatest great-est prophetic books of modern times, "The War in the Air," by H. G. Wells. When he wrote it nobody had seen an airplane fly, but he imaged the Japanese equipped equip-ped with flying machines with flapping wings, and the Germans with huge dirigible balloons, both making war on the United States and on each other. Mr. Wells was partly right, for the aircraft upon which Germany placed reliance in 1914 was the Zeppelin balloon. bal-loon. We saw a good many of them over here, for they could cross the ocean and back without trouble. Their weakness was the hydrogen gas with which they were inflated, in-flated, and which set the "Hindenberg' afire Just as it was making its last landing in this country. If we had ever let Germany get a supply of non-inflammable helium gas, which only America produces, we might be in greater danger now than we are. Some people laughed at that, but I don't laugh at anything Henry Ford says. I've seen him In action. In the World War I saw the Ford plant turning out 1 10-foot "sub-chasers," the Eagle Boats, at the rate of one a day. I saw him building Liberty motors for airplanes faster than any other motor builder, and heard some of them criticize him for using - better materials than the specifications spe-cifications called for. War aviators told me the Ford motors were the best of all. The problem, as Mr. Ford pointed out, is to simplify design and reduce the number of types of planes required. Now the Army has its own ideas, the Navy wants a different style, and everybody is trying to pick up the latest ideas developed in this war. And every plane manufacturer is trying to sell something original of his own design. Centralized, unified control con-trol is needed. BUNGLING .... militarists I have seen our Army and Navy in action and have talked with dozens of Generals and Admirals in time of peace. I have seen enough of the resuls of the bungling bung-ling by the brass hats, who administer admin-ister our military affairs from their swivel chairs, to give me little lit-tle confidence in them except as fighting men. When it comes to producing the tools for fighting they don't know where to begin. When the United States entered en-tered the World War our |