The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-01-01
MO|SANT'S PICTURE
 OF FUTURE FLIGHTS Wonderful Development Is Predicted in Aircraft A CHANGE TO SMUGGLE Vision of the Future Embodies Radical Changes in the Transportation
 Methods of All Nations of
 the World
A CHANGE TO SMUGGLE
BY B. W. HARBOLDT

New York, December 31.-(Special)-- The following recent interview with John B. Moisant, the aviator, who was killed at New Orleans shows his re- markedly vivid imagination.
 John B. Moisant is as daring in thought as he is in flight. I talk ed with him an hour and went away with a new sense of the sublime and of i'm pending changes profoundly important to the nations.
 What he said in regard to the revo- lutionary effect of trinmphal aerial flight upon the worlds traffic and in ternational comity was a vivid and earnest prophecy of things he believes to be immediately in store.
 Moisant predicts that within five forced upon. ttem through enlightened self-interest, will be brought to pass by commerce. carrying air craft. The traffic of these winged merchant ships will defy tariff walls below. They will compel complete readjustment in the codes of the nations. They will. he prophecies, virtually efface political boundG ries.
 Johnstone went two miles into the up- per abyss. His craft soon passed be- yond vision Thus the aerial fleets, all ready sailing sea that has no shore. can pass on paths not visible to the watchful nations below.
 In this Moisant sees an irresistible lure to contraband commerce, as he phrases it. The skies will be full of smugglers, if, indeed. they are not already plying their lucrative trade across some of the Euro pean frontiers.
 The monoplanes, biplanes and triplanes, even of present construction are strong enough and their lifting power is suffi- cient for consignments of diamonds and silks and some commodities having little hulk and great value and which now pay big tribute at the customs barriers.
 With the coming of the commercial air fleets there will be for time a world wide saturnalia of smuggling. he fore sees, to be followed by the readjustments of nations to the new age-the aerial age-and then an unexampled freedom of exchange and lasting peace. For, with the walls at the boundaries of nations gone, there would be no occasion left for war
 Nearly every one hitherto has dwelt upon the possibilities of the air fleets as swoops from the upper air and their grim facility in dropping dynamite upon de- fenseless towns have been put into graphic tales.
 These are dreams. Moisant thinks-mere literary nightmares.
 War there might be, then aerial squad rons, but not wanton war. The common business interests of the nations would intervene to prevent the wholesale bonn bardment of cities from fleets above.
 But, said Moisant, coming back to his first statements, what will seriously dis turb existing conditions will be the per- fecting of aerial vessels to carry freight. When this is done the trade of the world will be changed, and the whole system of governments, now dependent upon frontier revenues-a form of income col lected to finance a military establishfent maintained largely to enable the coun- tries to make that collection possible will become obsolete.
 The tariff walls will take their places with the portcullis and moat.
 And Moisant predicts this, not for re- mote day, but as reconstruction, dyna- mic and irresistible. the signs and por- tents of which now fill the sky.
 He predicts that the whole science of aviation will be startling in its new dis coyeries n. s.
 Already, as he has well said, progress in aviation is swifter than any field in which man has sought to dominate.
 was greatly impressed with Moisant, the architect and builder, practical me- chanician, economist, climber of the sky. For he has indeed hitched his chariot to the Armament And his mind has seem ingly taken the poise and freedom of the winged successes that lift him above the long paths that lead no man yet knows xx-l,n