Dream Field

For more than a decade air line pilots have been flying in and out of the obstructed, 147-acre Washington Airport with their fingers crossed. During that time, while Congress after Congress has passed the buck on the question of providing an adequate airport for the nation's capital, option-mongers have been busily cornering most available sites. One they could not corner, however, was that proposed at Gravelly Point, because 1) it lies largely beneath the Potomac, and 2) most of the 250 acres of contiguous land is government-controlled. Last year Franklin Roosevelt urgently recommended development of Gravelly Point, last spring he tried to jog the 75th Congress into doing something about it. He had dreamed about a bloody crackup at the present field. In its flurried closing days, however, Congress again failed to provide an airport site, but it did set up the coordinating Civil Aeronautics Authority, leaving it largely under Presidential control.

Last week the CAA, in its first big airport decision, gave its nod to the Gravelly Point site, immediately set about securing a $4,000,000 PWA appropriation, cooperation of the Army Engineering Corps and WPA labor to get the new Washington National Airport under way. A mile further downriver than the present field, the site lies three and a half miles from the centre of the capital, ten minutes away via the Mt. Vernon Memorial Highway. Immediate plans call for a 750-acre field, 500 acres to be "made" with fill dredged from the river bottom and graded off shore eminences. Conceived as a model for future airport improvement throughout the country, Washington National Airport will have four 5,000 foot runways each 150 to 200 feet wide, providing unobstructed approach from eight directions.

Planned for use within a twelvemonth, with finishing touches to go on for a year more, the eventual Washington National Airport will have a seaplane terminal at its south end, can be extended half its size again by filling in to the northeast. Peskiest bug in the project is the new, and roundly protested, research laboratory of the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads, sticking up like a sore thumb on Gravelly Point no feet above the Potomac and just to the west of the proposed field. Last week CAA and army engineers were planning to build the necessary air field structures in line with the laboratory building. Only other important objection to Gravelly Point has been that air activity there might conflict with traffic at the Army's Boiling Field, just across the river. That was ironed out, too, by a plan for a central control tower submitted by Major General Oscar Westover, Army Air Corps chief, just before he flew off to die in a crash at Burbank, Calif., last month.

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