A General's Return

An old face in aviation returned to a new job last week. Twangy, folksy Cyrus Rowlett Smith, 45, who left American Airlines three years ago to help establish the Air Transport Command, settled himself into the newly created job of chairman of the board of American. Vice President Ralph Shepard Damon, who has done the big share of running the line in "C.R.'s" absence, moved up to the presidency to take the place of retiring Insurance Man Alexander Nesbit Kemp.

In the three years he was away. C.R. made a fair share of A.T.C.'s globe-girdling history. As an Air Forces colonel, he mapped many of A.T.C.'s new routes, located and developed many of its airdromes. He retired as a major general with a chestful of medals received for achievements ranging from eliminating custom duties in North Africa to rescue work in Burma.

With American Airlines, which originally he pulled together from a disjointed, money-losing airline into the biggest, and one of the most profitable, he intends to make more history. C.R. and Damon work together as smoothly as the motors on one of their DC-3s. C.R. handles the finances. Damon the flying. But they do not think that the 9,457 miles of routes American now flies, besides ten transatlantic trips daily for A.T.C., are enough to keep them busy. So they have applied to the Civil Aeronautics Board to nearly double this mileage.

Last week, Washington buzzed that

CAB is about to hand American one of the plums which it has long sought: permission to buy American Export Airlines. At a dinner last week for Kemp and Smith, C.R. told his employes: "We are all proud of the 86 planes we have and we will be prouder of the 100 planes we will soon have. But any employe who can't see the day when we will have 1,000 planes had better look for a job somewhere else."

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