Planes to Spare?

Have the 177 planes the Army took over from the nation's airlines been used to full advantage? For months, in the airlines themselves, there has been a propwash of gossip that the commandeered planes are actually idle, and are rusting away in Army hangars.

Last week, with airline operators at their wits' ends to find equipment to handle their traffic, American Aviation dragged the question into the open: "The other day an airline finally obtained a 14-passenger Lockheed Lodestar that had been in the hands of the Army. . . . The log showed that the airplane had been used an average of 21 minutes a day over a period of 14 months! Less than one-twentieth of the use that would have been obtained in commercial service. . . . And there is no wastage in Army transport equipment?"

The facts: airline operators are 1) correct in assuming that there is some Army waste; 2) wrong in thinking the case of the underworked Lodestar typical. When the commercial planes were taken over, the Army found that countrywide facilities for servicing the Lodestars were sparse.

Because of this, the Army has used the Lodestars little, has given the bulk of its transportation job to the famed work horse, the Douglas DC-3. These have seldom idled in hangars. When a batch of them was returned to an airline recently (13 planes have been returned in all), airmen were amazed to discover that they had been flown more than nine hours daily, by the Army. This was more than they were flown in peacetime and nearly as much as airline ships get now.

The Lodestars have finally been returned to the airlines. But how many DC-3s can be pried loose from the Army in the near future is still an open question.

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