Transport: Model Airport

Berlin’s Tempelhofer Feld, a thousand-acre open space, long the Fatherland’s proudest parade ground, was made over into Europe’s crack airport five years after the War. Fifteen minutes’ taxi ride away is the heart of the German capital, swank hotels like the Kaiserhof, Adlon, Esplanade. Though still one of the most modern airports in the world Tempel-hofer’s buildings last week were ready for destruction to make way for an even more colossal port. It is calculated to serve the biggest commercial planes of the century ahead, and to function as a centre of all aviation in Germany. At one end of a surfaced, oval landing field, with 10,000-ft. runways, will curve a full mile of administration buildings, restaurants, hangars.

Passengers will arrive under a strut-free, translucent canopy projecting 100 feet from the principal waiting room, drive out of the airdrome along underground roads.

Atop the buildings will be tiers of seats for 100,000 spectators at air shows. Conceived by Reichsfuhrer Adolf Hitler, the designs have been drawn by Air Ministry Architect Dr. Ernst Sagebiel, who plans not only to lay out the biggest paved space on earth but to demolish church steeples, chimneys, high tension towers for miles around.

Every month as planes get larger (see p.47), airports seem to get comparatively smaller, more dangerous. To the shame of U. S. commercial aviation, which leads the world in volume, the airport at the U. S. capital is one of the world’s most dangerous. While Berlin was making a fine airport even finer, Washington could do no better last week than agree to regulate traffic around its 140-acre Hoover Field “to prevent collisions.” Too close to military fields, cut in half by a public road, overhung by high tension wires, a bluff and an omnipresent Goodyear blimp, airline pilots last year protested to the Bureau of Air Commerce against Washington airport’s further use for big, modern transports, threatened to quit landing there in 60 days. This speeded bills to enlarge the port, which were vetoed by President Roosevelt on the ground that no private concern should own the Capital’s airport. Threatened with loss of their jobs, pilots gave in, still uneasily use the field. Before last session’s Congress Vermont’s Republican Representative Charles A. Plumley thundered, “Washington-Hoover Airport is . . . both a public menace and a national disgrace.” Since 1928 a total of 49 possible airports, from marsh lands to race tracks, have been examined, but so far none has been found that is both politically and aeronautically safe. Meantime, various committees and the District Airport Commission continue a ten-year search to solve a problem “lousy with experts and options.”