Fast Boat to China

On April Fools' Day, when China Airlines' new Boeing 727 climbed into the early morning smog that blanketed Taipei's Sung Shan Airport, 14 paying passengers were scattered among the craft's 108 seats. C.A.L.'s management was understandably distressed: it was the inaugural jet flight for the little airline, which is just beginning to make a bid for one of the world's most lucrative routes--from Taipei up to Osaka, Tokyo and back, then a Taipei-Hong Kong round trip. By last week, business had begun to perk up, and China Air kicked off a sales campaign in the Far East and the U.S.

C.A.L. has every reason for confidence. In less than seven years, the line has parlayed high hopes and a low-flying PBY into a sophisticated operation with 24 aircraft, mostly antiquated DC-3s and C-46s. Though 1966 profits of $2.9 million were modest by international-carrier standards, C.A.L. executives nevertheless point proudly to the fact that they have increased revenues 106% in the past four years. Indeed, Nationalist China's first jet airline now bills itself as the fastest growing Asian company since Sony.

Prior to last week's leap into the jet age, C.A.L.'s coffers were filled chiefly by the wages of war. Charter work in Viet Nam uses 19 of its aircraft, and China Air pilots have been shot at by Red Chinese, Pathet Lao and Viet Cong. Admitting that he has no clearer picture of the Viet Nam war than anyone else, 55-year-old President Ben Y.C. Chow, a former Chinese-air-force lieutenant general who retired in 1964 to take the controls at C.A.L., is nevertheless planning for a more peaceful future. "Everything we've made has gone into the 727," he says, then adds that C.A.L. expects to take delivery of another 727 in September.

Chow's ambition, fired by government support, stretches far beyond the confines of the China Sea. He would like nothing so much as to return in one of his own airline's jets to America's West Coast, where he spent his youth working in his brother's grocery store. "I intend to have a transpacific flight around 1970," he says. But Chow is not alone in seeing the potential riches of that route. In Washington last week, the

Civil Aeronautics Board was in its second month of studying requests by 18 U.S. airlines to fly the Far East route, currently dominated by Pan Am and Northwest Orient Airlines. At stake for Chow and the 18: an estimated billion dollars of total annual air fares.

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