The Battle Begins

Pan American Airways' claim to be the indispensable international airline was threatened last week. The Civil Aeronautics Board opened hearings on applications for new air routes to Latin America. Promptly eleven airlines and five steamship companies appeared, prepared to prove that they should be allowed to share the southern sky lanes over which, for 17 years, Pan Am clippers have droned in almost lone supremacy.

The hearings were far & away the most important that young, earnest Lloyd Welch Pogue, 44, CAB's chairman, has yet scheduled. When the Board members finally decide--not before April 1945--they may settle once & for all two bitterly contested issues: 1) how many competitors will be authorized to invade Juan Terry Trippe's heartland; 2) whether U.S. shipping companies may engage in air operations. Best guess: that Trippe's Pan Am will be hounded by plenty of competitors armed with CAB certificates, but that ship operators will be anchored to their oceans unless Congress amends the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938.

Trippe is ready for the fight. Ever since he realized that his proposed "chosen instrument" policy for U.S. aviation was unpopular, he has been girding Pan Am for this battle. A month ago he politely fired the first gun in a rate war when he announced that Pan Am would spend $52 million to expand Latin American services, and slash passenger fares from 8 1/2-c- a mile to 3 1/2-c- a mile (TIME, Aug. 24).

This ambitious program would shoot Pan Am's postwar Latin American plane miles to 43.3 million a year v. 8.3 million in 1941; it would make available each year 58,976 airliner seats to Rio v. a mere 8,000 passages (both airliner seats and first-class steamer berths) in 1941.

Last week Trippe fired a second salvo. Many of his would-be competitors over Latin American routes hope to compete with Pan Am's Atlantic and Pacific services. So Trippe filed for routes that would sew up every major service on the world airways. He plotted on the map of Pan Am's world (see cut) new services to South Africa, to Moscow via Iceland or London, to Asia via Alaska, and to Australia via Hawaii. Most daring of all: the dream of pushing on across the Mediterranean over India, and linking Pan Am's Atlantic and Pacific routes into a globe-circling system. If & when other U.S. airlines get their overseas certificates, they will have to scratch hard and deep to live in Pan Am's tightly webbed world.

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