OCR Text |
Show I WAITING TO GO! A new industry has matured in this war, with a future so fantastically unlimited that its full significance signifi-cance can scarcely be grasped. That industry is aviation, avi-ation, and particularly commercial air transport. The people of the United States who would almost rather travel than eat, even in normal times, are now, after several yearr of war-enforced confinement, nearly bursting with anxiety to start moving. As soon as conditions permit, they will hit the road for far away places on everything that will carry them, from bicycles to airplanes. The airplane ranks high in the public imagination as a means of seeing remote corners of the world. And no wonder! Approximately 200,000 route miles have been flown in the service of the nation by passenger pas-senger and cargo planes operated by personnel of the Air Transport Command and the Naval Air Transport service. No lonely Pacific islet, no sweat-drenched African landing strip, no ragged Himlayan peak, has failed to see, in ever increasing numbers, the transports trans-ports carrying men and supplies from America to every quarter of the globe. These operations have been carried on against a background of airline experience ex-perience and with the help of airline pilots. When the war is over, worldwide military supply lines will become worldwide airways for the passengers and cargoes of peace. Planes are on drawing boards or in the process of construction that should forever silence the pessimists who claim that the age of adventure and new-frontiers is over. We have hardly begun to push back the frontiers, a fact that Americans are going to find Out for themselves when they can start traveling again. |