Dream Stuff

Trickier to get on and off than an old-fashioned boiled shirt, hemmed in by a landscape as disheveled as a Congressman's collar, the trapped and trammeled Washington-Hoover Airport has since 1926 been a fliers' nightmare. Landing or taking off in the big multi-motored planes that for the last decade have carried most of the U. S. air commerce, pilots have had to duck and dodge three 800-foot radio towers, a clump of tall brick factory chimneys, a snaking Potomac lagoon, a blimp hangar, the U. S. Experimental Farm and, until a month ago, a highway that bisected the airport's 4,200-foot North-South runway. Last summer airline pilots, exasperated by years of shilly-shallying by politicos with options on or interests in most available airport property in the Washington area, threatened to boycott the unsafe Washington Airport. Next day, the District Airport Commission recommended a site, at Campsprings, Md., ten miles southeast of the Capital. Passed by the Senate, a bill providing for a $3,500,000 airport on the recommended site has since awaited action by the House.

Fortnight ago, while pilots were bitterly wondering whether it would take a serious crash at Washington to jog Congress into action, President Roosevelt had a nightmare himself. To a group of Congressional bigwigs assembled for a White House conference, he told the story. It was that one night right after the fatal United Air-Lines crash at Cleveland, he dreamed that he got up from bed, walked to a White House window, and witnessed a terrible crash at the Washington Airport. Most of the conferees knew that only in a dream could anyone see the Washington-Hoover Airport from a White House window, but they knew, too, that Franklin Roosevelt's vision this time contained more probable stuff than most dreams are made of. From bushy-browed Kentucky Congressman Andrew Jackson May, chairman of the House Military Affairs Committee, came at week's end assurance that every effort would be made to have the Campsprings bill passed this week.

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