Death Sentence?

Back from the wild blue yonder, thousands of veterans jumped into the air transport business after the war. All they needed to set themselves up as irregular nonscheduled airlines was a little capital, some flying know-how, and one or more surplus planes, which the War Assets Administration was eager to sell them cheap. Some of them crashed, and some went broke. But about no nonscheduled lines have been doing well enough with cargo and air-coach services to throw a scare into the big, scheduled airlines.

Last week the Civil Aeronautics Board, prodded by the big carriers, announced that it would ground the nonskeds as of June 20. After that, any "large" irregular carrier (i.e., flying any airplane heavier than 10,000 Ibs.) would have to have CAB's permission to stay in business. In granting permits, CAB would hold the nonskeds accountable for such past sins as flying on what amounted to regular schedules, and thus, according to scheduled airlines, taking business away from them. Anybody who got a permit would have to stick to irregular charter service.

CAB had a tough problem. It had to look out for the well-being of the regular airlines, and the taxpayer who subsidized them, but it also had a duty not to stifle the free, enterprising spirit in which the nonskeds had been born.

No Frills. That spirit was typified by--among others--Air America, Inc. of San Pedro, Calif., founded last year by 34-year-old, Austrian-born Fred Miller. A civilian personnel director for the Army Air Forces, Miller joined the Flying Tigers cargo airline after the war and saved $15,000. This was enough to rent four DC-45 and start flying the lucrative Los Angeles-New York route last July. Flying 20 round trips a month at cut-rate fares of $99 ($58.85 under scheduled lines), Air America had carried 11,270 passengers by the end of the year. It had grossed $1,600,000 and netted a tidy $41,000. Miller did it by using 60 seats in his planes instead of the usual 44. He served no meals, put no uniforms on his help and cut costs on the ground and in the air.

Fred Miller has already applied to CAB for certification as an air-coach operator. Whether he gets it or not, the new rule is not likely to be a death sentence to Air America.; Miller can always retreat to some intrastate route, out of CAB's reach. But CAB's crackdown might kill off more than half the irregulars.

Chloroform. The airline industry might find it could not afford to lose them all. The nonskeds had tapped a new market by making air travel cheap enough to lure bus and rail-coach riders who never flew before. If some of the irregulars had irregular safety records, they had also proved to the scheduled airlines that they could fill their planes by cutting frills and fares. Nevertheless, many scheduled airlines still agreed with ex-CAB Chairman James M, Landis that the U.S. was cluttered with too many airlines. "An intrinsically weak airline," he told a Senate committee last week, "either should be chloroformed or absorbed by some other airline." Despite this, the nonskeds hoped that CAB would go easy with the chloroform.

Last week, with a grumbling reluctance about signing "a blank check which private airline management may fill in,"

CAB endorsed two big checks to Pan American Airways and American Overseas Airlines. Adjusting transatlantic mail pay for the three years ending last Dec. 31, the board gave Pan Am an additional $12,783,000, raising the rate from 40-c- to 83.1-c- per plane mile. It granted A.O.A. $2,346,000, raising its rate from 41.1-c- to 53.5-c-.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.