AVIATION: All Dressed Up

U.S. aviation looked very much like a sprightly young man all dressed up in fine clothes but with few places to go outside his own yard.

It had brand-new charters from the Civil Aeronautics Board to fly around the world (TIME, Aug. 12). The airlines who got them were busily readying great new planes, arranging for bases, planning schedules. But this week the U.S. had still to get them the necessary permission from many of the countries over which they would have to fly. Still posted against regular peacetime airline traffic were such key areas as Newfoundland, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, China, India, Russia.

Confused Policy. Partly to blame for this was the U.S. Government itself; so far it has bungled its comparatively new job as foreign agent for the airlines. As it now stands U.S. air policy is set and controlled by five separate, sometimes conflicting agencies—the CAB, the U.S. Maritime Commission, and the Interstate Commerce Commission, Federal Communications Commission, Department of State. Most recent sample of the boners that result: CAB last week blandly certified South Atlantic routes via Brazil to Pan American Airways, Inc. while the State Department was still pressing an uphill fight in Rio de Janeiro for a Brazilian agreement.

To settle the confusion, President Truman is thinking about creating a new post—Assistant Secretary of State for Air—to join all the loose ends. But even this step will not carry the U.S. over its biggest hurdle: competition with Britain.

Conflicting Policy. The airways conflict between U.S. and British policy began almost two years ago at the first International Civil Aviation Conference in Chicago. There Britain, fearful of U.S. air superiority, successfully fought against:

1) the U.S.-championed cause of the freest possible competition in international air traffic (i.e., the Five Freedoms);

2) the U.S. dream of solving the world’s air transport problems in family-circle style. As a result, every nation had to go off in the corner and make a separate deal with every other nation.

What went on in the corners was virtually private business until last month, when the U.S. crashed head-on into Britain while it was trying to reach an agreement with Mexico. Until then, the U.S., still clinging to its first dream, had signed almost a score of treaties* for air travel and landing rights. But Mexico put off the U.S. with plenty of argument, last and most clinching of which was the fact that opportunistic Britain had just signed an agreement with Argentina to split 50-50 on passengers, cargo, and flights passing from one to the other. The U.S. had offered no such deal to Neighbor Mexico.

Contaminating Policy. The U.S. delegates came home sputtering with indignation. What if other small nations took the same stand? The result, U.S. airlines hold, would be poison to U.S. world-girdling ambitions. In the case of countries like India, which has already spoken in favor of the 50-50 idea, the poison would be deadly: her airlines are still fledglings. While U.S. aviation looked on apprehensively, the State Department was trying to ease the tension. Hand-picked missionaries have left or are about to leave to do some top level, pre-treaty softening-up in China, India, Brazil (Newfoundland, New Zealand, and Australia have all but signed). Off to India—with the rank of minister—will go able George Brownell, ex-brigadier general and wartime assistant to the Assistant Secretary of War for Air. Off to Brazil last week went James M. Landis, ex-Harvard law dean now chairman of the CAB.

That all of them will return with converts is highly doubtful. Even if they do, there is still Russia, whose iron curtain reaches up to the stratosphere. Although Russian territory is smack in the middle of many proposed U.S. round-the-world routes. U.S.-Russian negotiations are at a standstill.

* With Spain, Sweden, Denmark, Canada, Ireland, Iceland, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, United Kingdom, France, Greece, Belgium, Turkey and Egypt.