The Waterbury Democrat., 1941-03-04

"But no one would question that the total must be stupendous. Eu- ropean volume of air mail and air freight far exceeded the U. S. in 1887, fairly normal year, chiefly because Europe had dropped all sur charges on first class mail and Eu- ropes railroad freight operations were maddeninsly slow. But the U. S., conversely, outstripped, Europe in passenger service, topping all air. lines of Europe combined.
 Tn attempting to measure the potential of air trade, however, the danger on the one hand is to as- sume that the present era of thin operations and heavy subsidy will continue indefinitely. and on the other to assume thatt he expansion of air commerce will come with Q rush," Fortune points out. "Air trac has been rising gteeply for over 10 years, and the end Is not in sight.
 "There is little likelihood for @ long time that the airplane will be & serious factor in the movement of ocean freight-though this in time will certainly come. But 1t does have an immediate potential in the matter of passengers.
 "A number of authorities who made various pre-War studies esti- mated that air transport would ab- sorb some 10 per cent of Atlantic first class steamship traffic in the next few years, and, on C. projec- ton based upon past growth, by 1860 would carry perhaps 80 per cent of all first class passengers. Nor did this take into account the development of new traffic, un- touched by steamships, througl. lower fares and the speed and ease overnight service to all Europe,
 "When all of the present poten- tials of air traffic are boiled down, to be sure, they still do not count up to much in terms of such mass movers of freight and human cargo as ships and railroads" Fortune admits. And, with the worldwide recession of foreign trade and the technological revolution that is ac- celebrating the self-suff1ciency of continents, the potentials might seem to be even less for the far fu- ture.
 Mere Projections
 But 1t would be a mistake to think of the trade routes of the air as merely Stratospheric projections of thet rade routes of the surface. The airplane is a. new kind of car- rier, keyed to new kind of world, a world lighter and more fluid than the world of the nineteenth cen- tury.
 And with the recession of that century, characterized by the heavy movement of raw materials from place to place. the laying down of roadsand railsand keels, the air plane comes forward as the true vehicle of twentieth-century man, moving swiftly upon & universal highway of air, fashioned to carry the lighter commerce of new era.
 "Just as the shifting patterns of sea power held the key to the rise and fall of ancient empires, through the expansioniSt mercantilism of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- turies and into the great period of British sea power. so the unresolved patterns of air power must inevit- ably hold the key to the rise and fall of existing empires and others not yet born.
 "The U. s. is here joined in an issue of world power that cannot be dismissed" Fortune declares. Precedent and inspiration exist in the past-in the magnificent period of the clipper ships. National neg lect brought that period to ruin in the transition from sail to steam. National neglect could bring ruin into the one approaching.