Airports

With proper expectation of contracts to design airports, architects at the Architectural & Allied Arts Exposition in Manhattan (TIME, April 22), secured a day last week to express their ideas. Naturally they warned against too precipitate airport building. Aviation still does not know what it requires in fields. Bad example is England's Croydon field. It was remodeled and enlarged just a year ago. Now it must be altered again at great cost. Airport ideas presented at Manhattan included underground passages to holes where planes would be waiting ready to start, great landing platforms over steamship piers, and a community arrangement around a circular field, its buildings rising in height as they recede from the centre. Next month at Cleveland, engineers will meet with architects, city planners, and flyers in an attempt to design best types of airports for various services. Lack of ports, like lack of trained flyers, is hampering the U. S. air industry. Flyers consider Croydon, near London, and the Tempelhof, near Berlin, at present the best equipped fields in the world. German flyers say Croydon as it was this past year was better than Tempelhof; British flyers call Tempelhof better than Croydon. Croydon's chief merit is that planes have a 1,400-yd runway in any direction. Practically all the field is grass-covered. That permits comfortable landings and takeoffs, except in rainy weather. Then the planes tear up the sod. To remedy that fault Croydon officials are considering putting a paved strip all around the field, as at the Rotterdam field. Croydon has two steel and concrete hangars, providing 90,000 sq. ft. of floor space. Each hangar has overhead cranes to move planes and motors. Back of the hangars are workshops, storerooms. Croydon's administration building is a large two-story affair with a roomy control tower rising above one end. It contains waiting room, telegraph desks, book shop, rest rooms, quarters for police, immigration, customs, airline and air administration officials. From the passenger's viewpoint Croydon, like so many U. S. airports, is far (12 mi.) from the centre of the community (London). But the English air lines provide comfortable automobiles between airport and metropolis.