"Policy,” says a recent successor to Noah Webster, “is the system or measures adopted by the sovereign power of a country in the management of public affairs.” In the implication of the term in the popular mind, however, that definition is narrowed by an insistence that the measures adopted must be consistent with each other and that they must be the product of an honest attempt on the part of all the parties in interest to anticipate the course of events and hit upon a course best suited to harmonize with probable future developments and, without frequent and violent modification, to tend with maximum efficiency toward the production of a desired final result. There must, in short, be a system, a system guided by a conscious intelligence, rather than a casual group of disconnected actions.
Judged by that standard, it becomes fair to say that the United States of America has never had and retained for any length of time a policy in aeronautical affairs as a whole. There has been great effort expended, and it has been backed in most cases by technical ability of rare, indeed in some ways of unique, quality. There have been, at times, generous appropriations. There have been a diversity and a multitude of laws flowing in an uninterrupted stream from legislative bodies ranging in scope and weight from the national Congress down to the boards of selectmen of insignificant villages, but, unfortunately alike for those interested in extending the use of aircraft and for those concerned only with protection from the danger resulting from their improper use, there has been little sign of consistency and continuity in all these acts of scores of different organizations.
What is air policy, and whence springs its importance? Why should we, as a people, worry about it? Why should we not leave the development of aircraft to chance and to private initiative inspired by hope of profit, confining our governmental interest to the purchase of equipment for the Army and Navy?
Definition, in this case, requires classification, a classification which can most readily be made under three headings corresponding to a like number of types of service, military, naval and commercial. Of the three, it is self-evident that the first two can be neglected only with grave danger to the national safety. No one who has given the slightest attention to the recent history of armaments, and in particular to the course of the rivalry between Britain and France in the air, will require either explanation or argument for that statement. As for commercial air policy, persistently to ignore its importance would be symptomatic of an indifference to the possibilities of new and improved means of transport, and a national self-complacency with things as they are, which would be the sure precursors of national decay.
The military and naval aspects have so far fared better in this country than have the commercial ones, for they have had the continuous attention of the two services, while it has been no one’s particular business to stimulate interest in the more peaceful uses of aircraft. In the activities of the Army and Navy it has been possible to complain only of a certain lack of correlation of effort which has grown out of an excessive rivalry between the services and between certain factions within them, and of an insufficient continuity in the selection of new types of aircraft for production. The first of those difficulties has been in part the result, in part the cause, of the very protracted and heated dispute as to the relative merits of a separate air force and of the existing system of the maintenance of two air services under the control of Army and Navy, respectively. That argument has at one time or another had a counterpart in most European countries. Great Britain actually adopted the separate air force policy some years ago. Italy, Russia and some other states of less importance have taken the same step, and the French have it under consideration, the debates on the subject in Paris being almost as warm as those in Washington. The second source of complaint, more technical in its nature, has been a natural result of the rapidity of the development of the art and of the consequent difficulty of deciding, at any given moment, which of a dozen tentatively-initiated lines of experiment it will be most useful to pursue The results are none the less unfortunate, for the ideal fighting airplane, to take a single type as an example, will never be secured by giving to six or eight manufacturers orders to produce a single machine, or two or three to the same design, each in accordance with his own ideas, and then switching the same group of factories to some other radically different type after all of the designs submitted have been found incompletely satisfactory. The aeronautical art is still to some extent dependent on trial and error, and the best results will be attained only by painstaking step-by-step development, in the course of which a single man or a single company should produce a long succession of airplanes for the same purpose and all designed closely along the same lines, the latter examples of the series being derived from the first by the somewhat tedious and humdrum process of removing defects as they appear, one by one. Brilliant invention is less needed now than careful attention to minute detail. There is much less ground for criticism on this score now than there was three or four years ago.
These criticisms of military policy are of relatively minor importance. Of air policy in its relations to commerce, constituting the third of the main subheadings, a less pleasant story has to be told. The great outstanding fact, on which all discussions must rest, is that the non-military use of aircraft has not yet been taken seriously by the American people as a whole or, with the distinguished exception of the remarkable work done by the Post Office Department in carrying the mails by air, by their government. While virtually every state in Europe, from the greatest and most powerful to the weakest and most completely bankrupt, has been giving both direct and indirect financial aid to air transport companies, there had not been passed by Congress until January, 1925, a single measure designed to lend the slightest encouragement to the operation of air lines by private enterprise in this country. The Kelly Air Mail bill, which became law during that month, constitutes a distinguished exception to the general rule of indifference. If a real policy is to be sought and adhered to, at least we have the advantage of being able to start with a nearly clean slate.
There are a number of motives which might properly impel us to give careful heed to the future of commercial flying, motives which may be broadly classified as military, political, and economic. Of the three groups, the military factors have undoubtedly been uppermost in bringing certain European nations to the granting of a subsidy, but, however that may be at the present time, the military interest of commercial flying will inevitably recede into the background and purely economic considerations will come more and more to the fore as time goes on. That development will be inescapable because the airplane and airship are needed for transportation. They furnish good transportation and efficient transportation. They travel at more than twice the average speed of any other means of conveyance now existing. Air travel is not excessively dangerous, and, considering the nature of the service rendered, it is not excessively costly, but commercial aircraft must be planned and judged as vehicles of peaceful transportation alone. The best commercial airplane and the best machine for military use are very different in form, and the attempt to adapt every airplane for easy conversion to military use, an attempt now made by several European nations, can only prove destructive of efficiency and so can only result in depriving the business community of the benefits of an air transport service, while at the same time failing to stimulate an aircraft industry large enough to be of material service in time of military need.
In the future of commercial aviation, then, and in America more than anywhere else, attention must be centered on the fitting of the airplane and airship into the nation’s transportation system at those points where there is most demand for them and where they will most increase the efficiency of a system as a whole. If that be done, a military advantage will accrue indirectly and unsought, for anything that increases the use of aircraft will serve to increase the number of trained pilots and mechanics available and to augment the nation’s facilities for the production and repair of aircraft and their parts.
As for the political factor, the effect of air transport on foreign relations may be expected to be less on the American than on the European continent, although even to us it should be a matter of some concern that intercontinental airship communication, and especially that with South America, should not be developed solely by European nationals. A line connecting Spain with Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires is already seriously projected, and if the plans are put into effect before any corresponding move has been made in the United States the distance from the metropolises of the Southern Continent to London and Paris, measured in days of travel, will become less than half that to New York. It will, in fact, be quicker to travel from the Argentine to Europe by air and thence to New York by liner than to take the direct sea route. Air transport in the Western Hemisphere should be of primary concern to the United States, but at present the only two air lines in regular operation in South America are under German control and a French mission is engaged in making a preliminary survey of the Central American field.
Within the Eastern Hemisphere the political importance of air lines, as of every other form of transportation, appears in every direction, and hardly a single one of the routes now being exploited fails to fit neatly into a national plan for the extension of national influence and prestige, either into far-distant colonies or into parts of the world where the great powers are now in, or are likely soon to come into, competition in their efforts to control the action of the local government. French airplanes travel on regular schedules over half a dozen routes in northern Africa, and the roar of an aero engine has become a familiar sound over the Sahara. France and Germany both have an eye on communications with Russia, and France, Britain, and Germany are all bending their efforts to the establishment of connections with the Middle East, approaching from three different directions. French enterprise has so far reached Angora via Constantinople, the Germans fly to Moscow and thence south to Teheran, and the British are carefully paving the way for the opening of an airship service which will run all the way to Australia, presumably with stops in India and in Persia or Iraq.
Always, however, one must return from the political, as from the military, factor to the consideration of the direct economic benefits to be derived. The United States Post Office Department has shown that the mail can regularly be flown from coast to coast in thirty-two hours, as against a train time of ninety hours, a relative saving greater than that made in the time of transatlantic passages from the Great Western’s record of ten and one-half days, set up three-quarters of a century ago, down to the present day. If the modern liner, a craft essentially uneconomical in operation, and having no distinctive merit except speed, has earned a place in the economic world, there must be a place there as well for aircraft, which offer the same advantage in a far larger degree. It is for that reason that this country needs a commercial air policy, and it is for that reason that we should plan now to extract the maximum of national profit from a form of transportation sure to grow in importance with the passage of time.
The first link in any such policy must be some measure of regulation of the operations of aircraft. Such regulation is necessary, first of all, for the public safety. The dangers of flying can be reduced to a point where they should not deter any traveler from taking passage by air, but that can only be done by using proper equipment properly maintained and operated by competent men. At the present time anyone, however slight his training, is free to purchase a decrepit airplane for a few hundred dollars and not only to fly it himself, a constant menace to those on the ground below, but actually to solicit the patronage of would-be passengers who lack the technical knowledge to realize the deficiencies of the machine and pilot to whom they are entrusting themselves. Conditions being what they are, it is little less than miraculous that accidents have been so few.
The operator of aircraft has reason to favor the enactment of some measure for federal regulation from a purely selfish point of view. The experience of American railroads has been sufficient to indicate that regulation is inevitable sooner or later, and that a period of complete freedom from control is almost certain to be followed by governmental action excessive in amount and unwise in form. Furthermore, the individual states are already acting, and it is intolerable that elaborate and conflicting sets of requirements should be enforced by political units so small that half a dozen of them may he crossed during a single flight. State regulation would be preferable to none at all, but the states should abdicate in favor of Washington as soon as Congress gets around to the point of taking action already long over-due.
Federal regulation implies the existence of a controlling organization, and the Wadsworth Aeronautics Bill, passed by the Senate in the sixty-seventh Congress and re-passed during January, 1924, and the Winslow Civil Aeronautics Bill introduced in the House and just brought in with a favorable report by the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce at the time when this article is being written, are alike in providing for the creation of a Bureau of Aeronautics in the Department of Commerce. Such a bureau could perform a service of tremendous value, outside of its regulatory activities and at very little expense, by furnishing a clearing-house for the exchange of information on subjects of general interest. At the present time the Army and Navy are independently doing work in the collection of information on landing fields and air routes which is of great value but could far better be centralized in a civilian Bureau of Aeronautics having the cooperation of the services and access to such information as they already possess. New discoveries and new data affecting the safety of flight, wherever and however made or secured, should be at once made available to all pilots and owners of aircraft, and there is no other way in which that can be done so effectively as through the organization that licenses the pilots and registers the machines. This does not, of course, imply invasion of proprietary rights in inventions, but only the distribution of information gained through governmental channels and of suggestions of methods of maintenance and operation which collective experience has shown to be profitable.
More important than the exchange of information among the operators of aircraft, however, is exchange between those operators and the public. A prime essential in the development of air transport is the stimulation of public confidence in the safety and reliability of aircraft, and that requires the distribution, in statistical form and otherwise, of the real truth about flying. Compared with records of achievement, no one’s opinions are of the slightest interest. Unfortunately, however, no such records now exist in the United States. The British Air Ministry publishes each year a statistical and descriptive report on commercial flying during the previous annual period. The number of miles flown on each route, the number of passengers and the weight and value of the goods carried, the percentage of reliability, and the number of accidents, when any have occurred, all are listed in detail, with comparisons with the performances of former years. More than that, when any accident does occur an official investigation is promptly made by the technical staff of the Air Ministry and a report on the causes of the mishap, with recommendations of the precautions to be taken to avert a repetition, is published. Much the same thing is done in France. Much the same thing is done in Germany. Only in the United States does the operation of aircraft proceed on purely haphazard lines, and only in the United States is it absolutely impossible for any human being to say, or to find out, how much flying is done and of what type and how many accidents occur and why.
The importance of federal regulation is not a thing only recently apparent, and it is not the fad of a few people. The matter is one on which there is, and has been for five years, virtually complete unanimity of opinion among all who have made the slightest study of civil flying here and abroad, and it is difficult now to find phrases not already worn threadbare in pleading the cause of aviation before Congress. In its report for 1920, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, a body of America’s most distinguished scientists, appointed directly by the President and serving without pay, said : “The committee is unanimous in supporting the Kahn Bill [later superseded by other measures accomplishing the same end] as modified. The most urgent need at this time is the development of commercial aviation under Federal regulation.” In 1921 the same committee stated first among its recommendations for that year that “The committee renews its previous recommendations for the establishment of a bureau of air navigation in the Department of Commerce, for the Federal regulation and licensing of air navigation, and to aid generally in the development of commercial aviation,” and in transmitting the report to Congress President Harding wrote: “I therefore urge upon the Congress the advisability of giving heed to the recommendations of the committee, the first and most important of which is that a bureau be established in the Department of Commerce for the regulation and development of air navigation.” In 1922 almost the same phrases were repeated. In 1923 the committee said: “The committee again recommends the creation by law of a Bureau of Civil Aeronautics in the Department of Commerce for the regulation and licensing of aircraft, airdromes, and aviators, and the general control and encouragement of commercial flying,” and President Coolidge, in his letter of transmittal, expressed himself as wishing “especially to endorse the recommendation of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics for the establishment of a Bureau of Civil Aeronautics in the Department of Commerce,” an endorsement later reiterated in his annual message to Congress. Yet nothing has actually been done, although, to be sure, the outlook for action is far more encouraging now than at any previous time.
Provision for Federal regulation, however, necessary though it is, does not constitute an air policy in itself. More than that is needed. There must be aid to proper flying, as well as restraint on that which is improper.
If we look to the practice of other countries, where commercial air transport is actually flourishing, for a guide, we shall find plenty of precedents for the granting of aid of the most direct sort, for practically every European state of any importance now gives a cash subsidy to the operators of aircraft. That unanimity of action, however, is largely the result of competition, for obviously a line running without subsidy cannot compete with a heavily subsidized enterprise operating on the same route under another flag. No such factor would act as an argument for a subsidy in the United States, where most of the flying done would be between points within our own borders, and no subsidy need be considered here. A subsidy, unless administered with great skill, acts to stifle business initiative and may easily do more harm than good. Aviation should, and must, get along without any such artificial stimulus.
In speaking of aid to proper flying, then, no cash grant is implied, and the aid furnished should be designed only to insure fair competition, not to guarantee profits to services operated in the face of an absence of any economic warrant for their existence.
It is obviously impossible for two or more companies serving the same route to compete on an equal footing if one is subject to heavy expenses of which the others are relieved, and if those expenses relate to the provision of facilities which must be available before there can be any flying at all the first company to undertake the service must assume them for the benefit of all its rivals as well as itself. The first in the field are then placed at a definite and permanent disadvantage, independent of and additional to the ordinary hazards of pioneering.
Landing fields, route marks, and lighting arrangements along a route are inescapably available to all who fly, whether or not they have made any contribution to the cost and upkeep of those ground facilities. There is no parallel between the railroad, which can reserve its right of way and its terminals to its own use or permit their use by others only after payment of whatever rental is demanded, and the air line. The analogy should be drawn rather between the air line and the shipping enterprise, and the ground organization for the use of aircraft should be provided by the government exactly in the same way, and for exactly the same reasons, that lighthouses along the coast and harbor facilities are provided by the governments of the world today. That seems so self-evident as to require no proof. When the necessity of governmental aid of that sort finally gains proper recognition it will become the duty of the Bureau of Aeronautics, if that badly-needed organization has by then finally been brought into being, to lay out a comprehensive scheme of airways for the United States, planning with an eye to commercial and economic considerations alone, and to decide on the manner and the order in which they should be developed.
Although the provision of landing fields and lights and aerial signposts and the broadcasting of general weather reports and storm warnings are necessary preliminaries of any commercial flying on a large scale, other inducements to capital should be offered to tide over the difficult early period during which the public is becoming accustomed to the idea of traveling by air and shipping its goods in that way. The easiest and most obvious of such inducements, and one which involves no expense whatever to the government, is found in the granting of a monopoly franchise for a term of years.
The spirit of American political thought has long been anti-monopolistic, but one must recognize the facts of a particular case. In its early stages, air transport is a natural monopoly, for there is little temptation to those who control capital to expend great sums and great efforts in developing traffic if others with smaller resources are free to come in at a later date and build on the foundations that they have laid. Aircraft are common carriers, and they may be made subject to complete government control. Let the government, then, offer exclusive franchises on some of the more important routes, guaranteeing against all competition for a period of ten, fifteen, or twenty years, and there will be some prospect that before the end of that time an adequate return will be gained to cover the cost of preliminary work.
Such action would have ample precedent both here and abroad. When the first long-distance railroads in this country, and especially those across the continent, were being built it seems to have been accepted as axiomatic that some reward must be offered to their builders. The grants of land ultimately to be of enormous value resulted. Any proposition that all the risk should be assumed by one company, with another coming in to parallel the original lines exactly and take away a large share of the business as soon as the country had begun to open up and it had become apparent that the enterprise was to be successful, would have been regarded as too ridiculous to merit discussion.
Another parallel for official limitation of competition is found, at a more recent date, in the story of European air transport. From the operation of air lines by a number of competing companies each country has progressed steadily toward monopoly, and the final step has been taken in Great Britain in the formation of the Imperial Airways, Limited, destined to assume complete control of all commercial operation of British airplanes on regular routes between the British Isles and other parts of Europe. A similar combine had been formed in Germany about a year previously.
Government interest in the operation of aircraft can find only one other proper avenue of expression, the actual provision of business in the carriage of the mails. The usefulness of the airplane in that field has already been more clearly demonstrated in the United States than anywhere else in the world, thanks to the extraordinary achievements of the Air Mail. That service has been in operation for six years now, and for more than three of the six the whole transcontinental route has been covered, every part of the distance between New York and San Francisco being covered in each direction every day. The aggregate distance flown is over two million miles a year, and the average percentage of perfect performance is over ninety for the whole year and often is above ninety-nine during the summer months. More significant still, it was by the Air Mail that the first serious attempt at commercial flying by night was made, and the experiment was attended with such complete success that the whole route between Cleveland and Rock Springs, Wyoming, is now lighted for night flying and a twenty-four-hour service is given throughout the year. The Air Mail has been invaluable as a laboratory of commercial flying and a source of data on costs of operation and other kindred matters, to say nothing of possessing a direct usefulness in accelerating the delivery of the mails which not only justifies but demands its continuance. Any air line to be started in the United States, whether it transports passengers, mail, or express, will owe a heavy debt to the pioneer work of those who have flown the mail since 1918, and any outline of prospective air policy which failed to emphasize the necessity of continuing the work so well begun would stand condemned as wholly inadequate.
The Air Mail should not, however, be spread out to routes entirely distinct from that now served. The channels of government operation are often tortuous, and the aim should be to enlist private enterprise as soon and as fully as possible. Besides, the merits of this service in offering an opportunity for experiments, the results of which will be made available to all interested together with full information on operating methods and problems, would be sacrificed in large part if the present unity of service were to be lost. Concentration on the further development of the route across the continent, with extensions along the coasts for moderate distances from the present terminals, will accomplish far more than an attempt to diffuse governmental efforts through the forty-eight states, even though all need and must ultimately enjoy the benefits of an aerial postal service.
They can best receive that service under private operation. The time has come when contracts for the carrying of mail by air should be entered into by the government quite as much as a matter of course as contracts are awarded for the rail transport of postal matter. Both in the last Congress and in the present one bills were introduced to permit the Postmaster General to make arrangements for the aerial transport of mail on such routes as he might select, and the Kelly Bill for the accomplishment of that end was finally passed and signed by the President on February 2, 1925. It is to be hoped that the first contracts will have been signed before this article appears in print. Action on the handling of mail by private air lines is desirable not only because of the direct benefit in the saving of time on a multiplicity of routes instead of on a single one under direct government operation, but also because it will stimulate the starting of the air lines, which will then be available for passenger and express business as well as for the service of the post office. The statistics on the amount of mail matter of various classes traveling on particular routes are sufficiently complete so that the quantity likely to be shipped by air can be estimated in advance with considerable accuracy. The government would then be in a position, without risk of appreciable loss, to guarantee a certain load on each trip, and the successful bidder for a mail contract would thus have a definite minimum income which he can rely upon for the duration of his contract provided only that he keeps the service up to the prescribed standard of regularity. That income will keep the enterprise afloat, even though the passenger business may be relatively slow to develop, and there is nothing which will bring passengers forward more quickly than the daily sight of airplanes passing overhead on a regular schedule, without accidents and without delays. The operation of an air line, whether the cargo be a diversified one or be made up in the early stages almost solely of mail matter, serves to stimulate that public confidence in air travel, by the growth of which that same air line will be the first to profit. Insofar as this nation as a whole will ultimately be the gainer by the addition of air transport facilities to its existing transportation system, the letting of mail contracts now will offer an indirect advantage in addition to its direct and obvious beneficial effect on the postal service itself.
The federal regulation of flying, the creation of a bureau to administer that regulation and serve as an aeronautical clearinghouse, the provision of landing fields and other necessary ground facilities and aids to navigation, the granting of monopoly for short terms, the continuance of the Air Mail, and the letting of contracts for the aerial transport of mail by private companies, these are the essentials of a sound American air policy in its relations to the operation of aircraft. The relations of such a policy to the production of flying equipment and so to the aeronautical industry also need very careful analysis.
Manufacturing organizations are incapable of indefinitely rapid expansion in time of need, and they cannot be called into being by magic. If the waste, inefficiency and delay which unfortunately but inevitably characterized certain phases of our participation in the late war are not to be repeated in an aggravated form in any future emergency of similar nature, a full plan of action must be formulated in time of peace and there must be created at least a skeleton of the organization necessary to put the plan into effect.
War needs in munitions and equipment may be met by an increase of the size and productivity of existing plants or by the conversion of factories to work other than that for which they were designed and normally used. The second method serves very well for shells, which can be made in any large machine shop with relatively little preparation, or for toxic gases, to the production of which dye works and other chemical plants can be turned within a very short time. For manufacturing units so complex and specialized as complete aircraft, however, dependence can be placed with safety only in organizations created for that work and actually experienced in it.
If so great a misfortune as a war between the United States and any one of the other major powers should come to pass, it is probable that we should require, within the shortest possible time, a productive capacity of at least 5,000 airplanes of moderate size each year. While the ratio in which an industrial organization can be expanded in a very brief time and without disastrous effects on efficiency is necessarily somewhat indeterminate, such analysis as could be made involving a variety of factors which cannot be discussed in detail here, a five-fold increase may be taken as reasonable in this particular case, due regard being given to the possibility of splitting up the work of manufacture and sub-letting contracts for the production of certain individual elements of the structure to qualified companies outside of aeronautical circles, the aircraft factory specializing on the more elaborate and difficult parts and on the assembly of the completed whole.
To insure ability to cope with war demands, then, there should be an American aircraft industry capable of building a thousand airplanes a year, and, if that number cannot actually be built and sold, either to the government or to private purchasers, the industry can be kept up to the point specified only by government subsidies which will directly cover the cost of maintenance of an engineering staff and a nucleus of shop organization. Repellent as is the idea of industrial subsidy, whether frankly avowed or disguised, such grants may sometimes be justified as a purely military measure. It will be far better, however, from every point of view, if the commercial and private demand can be so stimulated that, together with the normal requirements of the government services, it suffices to consume the normal product of an industry of size commensurate with the requirements of national safety.
To build a thousand airplanes a year with the expectation of a future demand either constant or growing gradually and steadily is one thing, but to produce the same number, knowing that the output may have to be quintupled almost overnight, is quite another. Preparation for emergency expansion is, in itself, a costly process, and it is only fair that the government should meet the extra expenses involved in such preparation. It is altogether proper that the price paid for airplanes for the use of the Army and Navy should be higher than that for identical machines sold to private owners, and such a discrimination should not be considered as being in the nature of a subsidy. If it be accepted that a certain degree of strength in a national aircraft industry is a national necessity, any private sale represents a net gain, a partial carrying of a burden which the government would otherwise have to support in its entirety.
An efficiently operated air line, getting a maximum of service out of each piece of equipment, needs but few new aircraft, and it is improbable that the manufacturers of airplanes will ever find a market of first-class importance among the companies engaging in the transport of passengers and express. A much better prospect lies in the sale of airplanes to private individuals for touring use, and any steps which can be taken by a Bureau of Aeronautics, or by any other organization, to facilitate and encourage such use will represent a direct contribution to preparedness for war, as well as to the convenience and pleasure of those who purchase or have any use of the airplanes. Thus, again, there appears a link between the commercial and military wings of air policy, but again there exists also a direct and non-military motive for a speedy development of civil flying in the United States.