New Rules

Air commerce regulations for the U. S. are four years old. To bring them up to date, to make air travel safer and more reliable, some 100 airline officials, pilots and insurance men went to Washington last week for a two-day conference with officials of the Bureau of Air Commerce of the Department of Commerce. By practically unanimous consent, these new rules were promulgated to take effect Sept. 1:

1) U. S. airlines will be split into operating divisions over which individual safety standards will prevail, based on terrain, weather, equipment, personnel.

2) Pilots will be licensed to fly only certain routes, will lose their licenses if off the route specified in them for more than 90 days.

3) Single-motored ships may no longer fly passengers over scheduled airlines after dark. (Exception: When darkness falls while nearing completion of a day run.)

4) Pilots may not take off with passengers after a forced landing anywhere except at a "regular" airway field.

5) Multi-motored planes must be able to circle and land with one motor dead, fully loaded, in case of failure of a power-plant on the takeoff.

6) Multi-motored planes may fly blind only if they can maintain with one motor dead an altitude sufficient to clear all route obstructions by 1,000 ft. Single-motored ships may fly blind only when there is a 2,000-ft. ceiling beneath them.

7) Dispatchers in future must be licensed for their jobs.

Unsettled by the conferees was whether 1,000 flying hours per year, with a monthly limit of 100 hr., was a suitable maximum for pilots. Airline executives held out for 110 hr. per month, pilots for 85.

Most significant of all the new rules is the one prohibiting night-flying of passengers in single-motored equipment. That Director Eugene Luther Vidal of the Air Commerce Bureau would like to see a great improvement in the reliability of single-motored ships is no secret. He said, however: "The conclusion reached was that at this stage of development single-engined craft have a definite role for day-time operations in scheduled air transportation."

The new rules, in effect, will raise the standards of the air transport industry as a whole to the high level voluntarily set by most of the big operators, who have long since made existing regulations obsolete by their development of improved equipment and operating facilities.

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