Progress

THE STRUGGLE FOR AIRWAYS IN LATIN AMERICA -- William A. M. Burden--Council on Foreign Relations ($5).

Last year William Burden. Special Aviation Assistant to the Secretary of Commerce, said, "The air age ... is not a thing of the future. It is already here."

He was speaking at a New York Herald Tribune forum on the problems that the air age gave to education. Winning the war means training youth to use air power. Creating a civilized postwar world means educating the whole U.S. to the possibilities of the new life whose framework is already here. These problems demand ''new world maps, a new geography, the rethinking of international relations . . . the support of an enthusiastic and discerning citizenry," and the abiding knowledge that "in the long run, air communication is bound to develop a sense of unity among people'' and further "the world organization which all civilized men desire."

The Struggle for Airways in Latin America is a prudent, expensive, handsome, 245-page, 9-by-11-in. atlas in green cloth binding that documents his case and illustrates his meaning. It is a record rather than a report. Reviewing a few years of progress, from nothing to continent-girdling order, it is as spare as the pioneers' records of their land titles and family connections.

The story is as simple in outline as it is complex in detail. Restricted in aviation after World War I by the Versailles Treaty, German companies, heavily subsidized, started South American lines. Slow, with poor safety records, high rates and poor equipment, and routes selected for military and political purposes, their efforts were seldom commercially successful. Only when they reached too near the Panama Canal was sluggish American opinion awakened.

In March 1928, a French company, Aeropostale, opened a route from France to Dakar by plane, across the Atlantic by boat to Brazil, by plane via Uruguay to Buenos Aires. One of the great ventures of a business age. the creation of Marcel Bouilloux-Lafont, Aeropostale could get an airmail letter from Paris to Argentina and a reply back in less time than U.S. business correspondence could make the one-way trip from New York.

In comparison, the story of the first U.S. ventures, involved in the tangle of airmail contracts in the U.S.. embittered by perplexing fights over routes, makes chastening reading for Americans. A few people--Elmer Faucett of Compania de Aviacion Faucett and Hugh Wells of Condor Peruana de Aviacion--challenged the European combines. The German stranglehold was broken when Axis airlines were nationalized by Latin American governments in the past two years. And now, says Aviation Assistant Burden, in cautious language: "The airplane promises to give Latin America a semblance of physical unity by overcoming the formidable geographical barriers which have divided it from time immemorial. . . . The airplane promises to open up this huge area rapidly. . . . The project is comparable in magnitude to the opening of our own West."

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