AVIATION: Forced Landing Ahead?

As an air-minded youngster around Chicago, chunky George T. Baker bought an old plane and barnstormed around the Midwest and Florida. Later, in Miami, he started National Airlines, Inc. with one plane, and made money by doubling as mechanic, ticket salesman and hangar-sweeper. By 1944, when he was operating seven planes, the Civil Aeronautics Board was so impressed by his line that it awarded him such rich scheduled routes as the New York-Miami and Miami-Havana runs. Overnight the onetime feeder line became one of the potentially richest trunkline carriers in the U.S.

Last week, in an unprecedented move, CAB threatened to put National out of business. It proposed to revoke National’s franchise as a scheduled carrier and order it to sell its routes and equipment to Pan American, Delta and Eastern Air Lines. National was in the red—and traffic had fallen to such a point—that CAB questioned whether National was doing the job it should be doing.

It was not engine trouble but labor trouble that threatened Pilot Baker with a crash landing. For six months this year most of his regular employees were out on strike. His clerks left when he insisted on his right to subcontract clerical work. Then mechanics refused to cross the clerks’ picket lines. His pilots walked out after Baker fired one of them when his plane crashed. Baker hired a new staff and kept his planes flying, but he could no longer make his airline pay, especially as travelers were leary of his new help. Even after the clerks returned to work two months ago, his planes went out more than half empty, and in twelve months he lost $1,907,347. Recently he began to discuss merging with Delta.

Even so, CAB may find it difficult to take away National’s franchise. Baker could make a good case that CAB was being unnecessarily harsh. The grounding of the DC-6s had laid up his four newest planes last winter, and, until recently, when its air mail subsidies were upped, National had received the lowest (2½¢ a mile) rates in the industry. Baker has already enlisted the help of the governor of Florida, and the Miami Chamber of Commerce will fight CAB’s proposal at the hearing Dec. 1. Even the strikers were worried at the prospect that their jobs might be wiped out for good. Said one union leader: “We’d rather go back to work for National. Potentially it’s the best airline in the country—if Baker would just divest himself of the operations end.”