AVIATION: Nest for Fledglings

At New Jersey’s Teterboro Air Terminal, just six miles across the Hudson River from Grant’s Tomb, there was a lot of hustle-bustle last week. Lanky young pilots, many in their old Army flying jackets, darted about the coveys of DC-3 freighters and the smaller Piper Cubs, Cessnas and Beechcrafts scattered around the field. Steamrollers were snorting away, lengthening the landing strips to 4,500 feet. In a corner of the field, handlers coaxed a horse into a freight plane. Regularly, every minute or so, a plane took off or landed.

Bouncing in & out of the mudholes and dodging the landing planes, a sleek car carried a plump, moonfaced man who was trying to watch everything at once. Fred L. Wehran, Teterboro’s owner, was fighting to make Teterboro the biggest air freight field in the U.S. (With 1,000 plane movements a day it was already the busiest privately owned airport.)

Last week, Wehran won a significant skirmish. Transocean Air Lines, which operates a fleet of ten DC-4 overseas freighters, moved its eastern base from LaGuardia Field to Teterboro, giving Wehran his first transatlantic service.

The Hard Way. Wehran, a Marine pilot in World War I, then a barnstormer and a booking agent for Alaska bush flyers, got acquainted with Teterboro the hard way. He crashed there in 1924. In 1941, when he cast a speculative eye at it, the gone-to-weed field did not look much better to him. But Wehran thought it had possibilities. He scraped up the $100,000 down payment and bought the field for $500,000. Then he persuaded Standard Oil Co. (NJ.) to finance the remainder on a ten-year mortgage and lend him $500,000 more to 1) build three 3,000-ft. runways and 2) buy another 200 acres to add to his 350. In return, Wehran agreed to sell only Standard’s gasoline.

The Army used his field during the war, so it was not till V-J day that Wehran settled down to making it a freight center. Air freight, he thought, had a big future. Moreover, he liked the spunk of the fledgling air-freight flyers. “Nobody can tell them they can’t make a go of it,” he said. “Give them 99 reasons why they can’t, and they’ll give you one reason they can—and you’ve lost the argument.”

He lured them to his field by selling gas cheaper (there were municipal taxes at LaGuardia and nearby Newark) and by not charging landing fees. Instead, he charges monthly rental on land and buildings.

The Easy Way. Today he has six flying schools, more than 300 private planes and some 35 freight-flying lines at his field. No matter how harebrained their plans, Wehran is willing to let the freight flyers set up shop at his field. Some ex-Navy pilots flew in a folding-wing torpedo bomber a fortnight ago. In delivering freight, they plan to fold the wings, run the plane through the streets to their destination.

Before long, Teterboro will have a new $1,000,000 freight terminal building, with refrigerated warehouses, maintenance shops for all types of planes and bunkrooms for pilots. Last year, Wehran made his first profit. This year, he expects to net $150,000. As a recipe for success, he could truthfully quip: “It’s easy. Just go into partnership with Standard Oil.”