Pan American Pushes On

From the map of his 22,000-mile Pan American Airways, able young President Juan Terry Trippe struck the last remaining legend of railway route last week. About his entire system, which coils like a python around South America, slithers across the islands of the Caribbean and flicks all Central America with its tail, a U. S. salesman can now hurry with never an hour lost on a train. For Pan American Airways Corp. (holding company for the system) announced the purchase of practically all of Cuba's air transport industry, the 14 airports, eleven planes, 850 miles of route, of Campania Nacional Cubana de Aviation, S. A. Though Compania Nacional will be operated as an independent unit, its personnel kept intact (largely as balm to Cuban national feeling), it will be coordinated with Pan American's three trunk lines. North-bound passengers from Barranquilla and Jamaica can change at Cienfuegos to plane instead of train for Havana.

Only the week prior President Trippe had struck another railroad legend from his map of the world's biggest air transport system. Planes had begun to drone in regular service from Vera Cruz, low on the Gulf of Mexico, up to Mexico City, following the old route of Conquistador Cortes, of General Winneld Scott and his U. S. Army.

From Paris, where he discussed interconnections with French Aeropostale for its mail delivered by boat across the South Atlantic from French Africa to Natal, Brazil on the Pan American System, unresting President Trippe flew last week to London to ponder a mail route (with Imperial Airways; from the U. S. to Europe via Bermuda and the Azores.

Pan American was also making news last fortnight far in the North. It announced that its summer service from Boston to Halifax would this year be extended, if mail contracts are forthcoming, to turbulent St. Johns, Newfoundland. Cooperating with Transamerican Airlines Corp. (operating between Cleveland and Chicago), Pan American will push surveys and preliminary research this summer in a drive to span the Atlantic by way of Greenland, Iceland, the Faeroes and Shetland Islands to England and the Continent. Last summer Pilot Parker Cramer was drowned in the Atlantic as he was completing an experimental flight over this route.

Last fortnight Denmark refused Transamerican Airlines concessions for bases on its Eskimo colony, Greenland (TIME, April 18). That this implied a breakdown of the project was denied by company officials; negotiations would be continued, they said. But the Parliament of the Kingdom of Iceland (whose king is big King Christian X of Denmark) did not refuse to grant a 75-year franchise to Transamerican when Judge Gudmunder Crimson of Rugby, N. Dak., who in 1930 represented his State at the millennial of the founding of the Icelandic parliament, intervened. Judge Grimson went to Copenhagen to plead with the King of Denmark and of Iceland.

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