Crowded Ocean Routes

For the Air Transport Command, U.S. commercial airlines are dispatching transports on overseas flights at the rate of one plane an hour.

Pacing the field, with more than 5,000 Atlantic and Pacific crossings since Pearl Harbor, is Pan American Airways, to whom international flying is old stuff. But pushing close behind in total number of flights are a handful of domestic operators who after the war plan to challenge Pan Am's supremacy as the top U.S.-flag overseas operator. The achievements of these newcomers in ocean flying are impressive :

> American Airlines announced last week that it is making 150 flights a month over the transatlantic route for which it has filed an application with CAB for postwar operations.

> Transcontinental & Western Air, also an ambitious contender for future Atlantic routes, has scored better than 1,300 Atlantic crossings for ATC.

> Little Northeast Airlines, with less than 800 miles of domestic lines in New England, and applications with CAB for services to Moscow and Ireland, has well over 500 Atlantic crossings to its credit.

> In the Pacific area United Air Lines is piling up experience with a record of some 600 transpacific flights in its log books.

> American Export Airlines, who bitterly fought Pan Am's monopoly before the war, but did not make any scheduled flights, is now hard at work making at least two transatlantic trips a day.

At least one problem which CAB will not have to worry about in the postwar division of the oceans among U.S. airlines will be the question of who knows how to fly them.

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