Howell Hearings

Last week the most exhaustive aeronautical survey ever undertaken by the Federal Government opened in Washington as the Federal Aviation Commission, headed by Atlanta's small, roly-poly Clark Howell, began public hearings. An outgrowth of the airmail contract cancellations, the Howell Committee was a belated attempt by President Roosevelt to right a wrong and, at the same time, determine a national aviation policy. Chairman Howell had spent six weeks investigating, at Government expense, the condition of aviation in Europe, while his four fellow committee members had flown some 1000 miles on an inspection tour of airways and airports in the U. S. and Central America.

Witnesses at the first week's hearings of the Howell Committee included:

Daniel Calhoun Roper, Secretary of Commerce, who declared the U. S. should be "aeroized" just as it was "motorized." For a means of "aeroizing" the country he suggested that the Howell Committee confer with "some of the outstanding leaders in the motor industry."

Dr. George William Lewis, Director of Aeronautical Research for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, who foretold development within four or five years of a 400-m.p.h. military plane capable of flying from Washington to New York in half an hour.

James Aloysius Farley, Postmaster General, who predicted that the U. S. airmail system would become self-supporting within three or four years. Until that time, said Mr. Farley, in nearly the exact words of onetime Postmaster General Walter Folger Brown, it would be the Post Office Department's policy to continue financial assistance to mail-carrying transport lines. As to new airlines, the Department's position was that it was economically unsound to finance them in competition "with the lines we are trying to build up."

Eugene Luther Vidal, Director of the Bureau of Air Commerce, who urged a five-year expansion program for U. S. airlines to foreign countries, under Government subsidy; also a passenger subsidy to domestic airlines as an incentive to further passenger traffic.

Ewing Y. Mitchell, Assistant Secretary of Commerce, who proposed that the Federal Government spend $17,000,000 on two giant dirigibles for a regularly scheduled round-the-world passenger service.

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