ARMY & NAVY: Air Pressure

ARMY & NAVY

U.S. airplane manufacturers have long been exerting pressure in Washington to get permission to sell advanced types of U.S. military planes to first-class foreign powers. They have argued that expansion of their foreign markets would enlarge their capacity to serve the U.S. in emergency, greatly reduce production costs. The Army & Navy could see no reason why advanced models developed with U.S. Government dollars should be made immediately available to foreign powers and the manufacturers got nowhere with their arguments. Nevertheless, they continued to apply pressure. Reports have circulated freely this autumn that the British Air Ministry was preparing to buy 1,500 fighting planes from unnamed U. S. manufacturers. Last week Secretary of War Woodring and Secretary of the Navy Swanson, wearying of the pressure, decided to have the question of foreign sales settled formally and finally by President Roosevelt. After a White House conference, SecretaryWoodring announced that the President had ordered the State Department to invoke the export licensing section of the Espionage Act, refuse to license the export of U. S. military planes until their types have been in use by the U. S. for approximately two years.

Manufacturers may still sell military planes to foreign powers, but few first-class customers will take two-year-old models. U.S. military plane exports in the last six months: Argentina, $285,000; China, $948,012; Mexico, $299,904; Russia; $117,676; Brazil, $9,600; Holland $1,162,600; Japan, $63,000; Ecuador, $125,550; Honduras, $14,950.

Another group of U. S. businessmen has been applying lighter-than-air pressure in Washington, to get the U. S. to re-establish itself in the rigid airship field. They could derive some encouragement last week from the annual report of Rear Admiral Arthur B. Cook, chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics. Admiral Cook made, without change, the recommendations made last spring by his predecessor, Rear Admiral Ernest J. King: for the U. S. to begin immediately the construction of a metal-hulled airship of 1,500,000 cu. ft. capacity, a larger airship of2,500,000 cu. ft., a still larger one comparable to the German Hindenburg, which has a capacity of 7,000,000 cu. ft.