Transport: Airports

Last week, to Newark’s fury, Mayor LaGuardia finally won a skirmish in his fight to have a home field supersede Newark Airport as Manhattan’s main air terminal. Fortnight ago he personally detonated the dynamite which felled a power-house chimney which was the only approach hazard at Floyd Bennett Field. Last week this improvement finally persuaded an important airline to try Floyd Bennett; American Airlines inaugurated a “summer service” of one plane a day from Floyd Bennett to Boston. American’s eight other Boston flights will still start from Newark and all will terminate there. Advantage: passengers to Boston save 20 min. ¶ Next to Newark, busiest U. S. airport is Chicago’s Municipal Field. Chicagoans have long been upset by fear they might lose their air predominance because the airport was made hazardous to bigger planes by tracks of the Chicago & Western Indiana Railroad across one end. For two years Mayor Edward J. Kelly has waged a battle to force the railroad out. Last week the two finally came to terms. The railroad agreed to move at once; Mayor Kelly agreed to spend some $350,000 buying a half-interest in the new right of way, give it outright to the railroad.