Get the Row Over

Despite frantic last-minute coaxing, Russia had stood firm on her boycott of the air conference of 52 nations (TIME, Nov. 6). China sat silently by, with neither plans nor planes. And Britain and the U.S., though they still used fairly polite language* to each other, were readying some rude, two-fisted arguments. The two nations, which have been poles apart on how postwar air routes should be parceled out and regulated, said in effect: let's start the row now and get it over with.

Open Hand. Adolf Berle Jr., chairman of the U.S. delegation, told the 160 delegates in Chicago's Stevens Hotel ballroom that the U.S. wants the freest of air competition, along with an international air body with power limited to technical and traffic control matters. Most of all, the U.S. wants to stake out right now some 140,000 miles of overseas air routes so that U.S. companies can begin overseas flying as soon as the war permits. Berle promised that the U.S. does not plan to use its present domination of global airways to forge a postwar monopoly. He further promised that the U.S. will "make available," when the war permits, the transport planes* which other nations need.

Closed Competition. Lord Swinton, United Kingdom's tall, suave Minister of Civil Aviation, chairman of its delegation, then stated the British view: a demand for an all-powerful international air authority. He wanted this potent authority to dole out air routes & air traffic (i.e., set national quotas), to control even the number of flights between countries. Thus, even though the U.S. should supply the greatest part of postwar transatlantic traffic, as it did prewar, many a U.S. expert feared that a quota system would force some of it to fly in British planes. They were sure that this crippling of U.S. air development was exactly what Britain wanted--until its commercial air force could be built up to equality.

Use a Bulldozer? A score of delegates of small nations, chiefly in Latin America, lined up alongside the U.S. They were ready to trade landing rights and vote the American way in return for U.S. planes and flying "know-how."

Britain's globe-girdling string of bases, but its lack of planes, began to seem less important than the vast U.S. transport fleet, the clocklike U.S. flights across the Atlantic every 13 minutes, the new U.S. bases, as in Liberia. Last week, the correspondent of London's liberal News Chronicle cabled from Chicago: "Staggering figures about U.S. capacity to dominate the air routes . . . have come out of America. A good many of the [British] air experts at Chicago . . . have had a rather sharp knock since they arrived. The sensation has been comparable to a man who takes his wheelbarrow to his allotment and finds his neighbor briskly starting up a bulldozer."

*But not so polite in the privacy of their own countries. In London, Brigadier General A. C. Critchley, director general of the British Over seas Airways Corp., said that the British would lick the U.S. in the fight for air traffic because "we know how to look after our customers better than he does, and we have the men to do it. In America, service means servility, and they have no real idea of service to passengers as we understand it. ... They all want to be President after selling newspapers."

*In the Stevens, salesmen of the big U.S. planemakers, eager to sell new "dream" planes, set up exhibits, liberally served Scotch and food. Glenn L. Martin Co. topped them all with plans for a two-motored Martin Mercury which, it predicted, would carry passengers at the exceptionally low rate of 2 1/2-c- a mile, slightly above the lowest U.S. train fares.

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