The Waterbury Democrat., 1942-08-13

ial cargo carriers.
 Before the United States got into the war actively, U. 8. commercial airlines had in service about 50t cargo planes--35O of them operated by domestic land lines, l5O of then operated by Pan American on it' foreign and overseas routes. Addi. tional planes were on order by most commercial airlines with the ajol manufacturers Boeing was building new clippers for Pan American Douglas was building more standard DC-3's and few of the newer, big ger, four-motorcd DC-4's. while Lockheed had plans for It's new Constellation model.
 Then in December of l94O, a gov ernment request" was made to the plane builders that no more deliv- cries be made to private purchasers, and little later orders were given to stop production of all commer- cial planes. To all practical pur- poses the manufacture of cargo planes came to dead stop.
 ATTITUDE ALTERED
 Nina you, that was only little more than year and a half ago. Contrast that order with all the ex- citement now to build all the cargo planes possible.
 This is probably a large meas ure of hindsight, and from the Army Air Force point of view, there Is justification for these drastic orders curtailing produc- tion of transport planes. As Lieut. Gen. Henry H. Arnold testified be- fore the Lee committee, the first demands were for training planes so that flying prsonncl could be developed large enough to meet any requirement., and the second demands were for combat ships and bombers as dictated by Great Britain. Even so, in se- curing the large number of train CTS required the orders were con- centrated with the major compan- les. whereas these primary train CTS might have been ordered from smaller companies. leaving the big companies to continue the produc- ton of transports.
 But this inability to get new equipment is not the only sad part of the story, from the commercial airlines' point of view. Gradu- ally. the Army has been taking over the commercial airlines' equipment and personnel, throw ing on them a load of reSponsi- bility for developing aerial trans port pilots and actually flying their own ships all over the world. Not only that. but additional cargo planes from the Army will be assigned to the commercial air lines, as they become available. The reason for this is simply that the commercial airline pilots have done better job on route flying and ferrying operations than have the Army pilots. trained for com bat flying.
 Meanwhile, the scramble over where these additional cargo and transport planes are to come from will apparently go on for some time. General Arnold says he would welcome additional cargo planes, provided they do not in. terfere with the Army Air Force balanced program which calls for building of from 2l per cent to 32 per cent of the multi -engined bomber type planes as cargo car riers and troop transports. The Army Air Force would like the additional planes built In half the number of man hours now going into transport plane production, and would like these planes built of non-critical materials. Those limitations lead to conclusion that the Army Air Force top com mand Is bucking, or at least isn't any too interested in the Kaiser proposals. in spite of the personal assurances given to Kaiser by Undersecretary of War Patterson and WIPE boss Nelson.