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Show Hippety-Hop Over the Globe By Beverly Smith (WNU Feature Through special arrangement arrange-ment with American Magazine) I landed this afternoon at an airport air-port in Maryland. Where do you think I was last night? In Iceland. And yesterday morning I was in London. That's the way the U. S. Army Air Transport command plays hippety-hop hippety-hop with global geography. Primary jobs of the Air Transport command are: first, to take planes as they roll off factory assembly lines and fly them to army airfields in the U. S. A. or to the fighting fronts anywhere in the world; second, sec-ond, to pick up vital loads of men and materials, which cannot wait for surface ships, and fly them to the point where they are wanted, anywhere in the world. Simply a world-wide air delivery service, combined with a world-wide flying freight and passenger service. Sounds simple, doesn't it? But it isn't. After spending weeks talking with its mechanics and high officers, its pilots, navigators, and weathermen, I still find trouble describing the Air Transport command. It grows literally faster than you can write. Already it is larger than all the prewar pre-war air lines of the world combined. Already Brig. Gen. Harold L. George, in command, looks forward to the day when it will be ten times its present size. But it isn't the size; it's the importance im-portance to our war effort. Not long ago, in an inaccessible part of Alaska, an important military hospital hos-pital was burned to the ground. An SOS was sent to the command. Material and equipment were flown in. Within 36 hours a 24-bed emergency emer-gency hospital was set up and operating. op-erating. This freighting operation would have taken weeks with surface sur-face transportation. Planes Versus Ships. "But how," I wondered, "do transport trans-port charges, with even the latest model air transport plane, carrying only 20 tons, compare with those of a ship carrying 6,000 tons?" Here, the Air Transport command, with its world-wide operations, is proving out a new tonnage-mile arithmetic. For example, take 80 cargo planes 5 tons each. That makes 400 tons. In one month those cargo planes can make 15 trips each, while the merchant ship is making one trip. Fifteen times 400 equals 6,000. Thus, 80 such modern cargo planes can do the work of one big merchant ship. And the planes don't have to worry about submarines. Of course, the ton-mileage cost of plane freight is still far above that of ship freight, but it is creeping down. Mass production of the big sky-trucks is just getting well under way: costs will go steadily down; efficiencies and pay-loads are going go-ing steadily up. The point where valuable express freight may find cargo planes cheaper than railroads, trucks, or ships is coming into sight. And then? It's a Small World. Yes, the world is making one of its swift changes under our very eyes, as it did when Fulton's first steamboat chugged up the Hudson, or when the golden spike was driven into the first transcontinental railroad, rail-road, or when auto pioneers began tinkering with mass-production assembly as-sembly lines. Little over a year ago, this terrestrial ter-restrial child prodigy was set up under the name of the Ferrying Command by a presidential order directing the army to. help speed up delivery of lease-lend planes to Britain. It started with two officers and a clerk. On June 9, 1941, an army pilot took off from a factory with a new plane and delivered it to the British in Montreal. The events of December 7 boosted the infant command to world dimensions. dimen-sions. American production of armaments and planes reached record levels. American production, we agreed, would win the war. Recently I passed some time at a great Air Transport command field in the eastern part of the United States. A year ago this land was a potato patch. Now it is crisscrossed criss-crossed with runways each over a mile long. Barracks have been built, hotels brought into service, to house the fliers and maintenance men. Dispersed Dis-persed about the field, as far as the eye can reach, are heavy bombers, light bombers, big transport planes. Some have just come in, others are about to take off. Tank trucks rumble rum-ble about feeding fuel into the planes, while mechanics give the final check-over check-over before the planes leave for Persia Per-sia or Chungking, or Russia, England, Eng-land, or Alaska. This is something new under the sun a Grand Central Station of the Air, with Destinations Unlimited. |