Airways

The summer of 1926 may come to be chronicled in histories as the beginning of an era when the U. S. actually leapt into the air, stayed there. No more sporadic gestures like the Shenandoah, the Hawaiian flights, but real laws, appropriations, Cabinet officers, potent metal planes, transcontinental airways mark the summer. Auspicious events:

1) Congress awoke to the need of air defense, appropriated nearly a quarter of a billion dollars for Army and Navy programs; President Coolidge appointed F. Trubee Davison and Edward P. Warner

Assistant Secretaries of War and the Navy, respectively, to direct aviation (TIME, July 12).

2) Edsel Ford reported to the President concerning the progress of the Ford industries in commercial aviation, told him of a program to build 100 all-metal, three-motored planes which can carry a ton of freight efficiently and at comparatively low cost (TIME, Aug. 9).

3) Last week the President approved of Secretary Hoover's trans continental airways plan, appointed William P. MacCracken Jr. Assist ant Secretary of Commerce in charge of aviation.

Mr. MacCracken is young at 37. He has the same pioneering blood zooming through his arteries as have the youthful Air Secretaries Davison and Warner. With these three men in Washington, U. S. aviation is expected to emerge from the blimp era. Secretary MacCracken is a Chicagoan by birth, education, residence. The Uni versity of Chicago taught him letters and law. In the Army he taught flying at Houston and Waco, Texas. After the War he returned home, practiced law, be came Secretary of the American Bar Association. His specialty is aeronautic law. He helped formulate the Air Commerce Act, recent ly enacted by Congress. Among other activities he organized the National Air Transport Co. two years ago. Now he resigns all private enterprises to go to his pioneering desk in Washington un der Mr. Hoover. Mr. Hoover, as every one knows, is ubiquitous. If it is not radio, it is farm relief, or aviation. Last week it was mostly aviation with a dash of farm relief thrown in (see THE PRESIDENCY, p. 5). Herbert Hoover has a brain that works in vast, sweeping programs. He showed Mr. Coolidge a plan for commercial aviation that made the Berlin-Byzantine-Bagdad railroad scheme look like the Toonerville Trolley. Mr. Coolidge approved.

The Hoover program opens the Government air mail routes to commercial and private aviators. The Department of Commerce will have additional illumination and landing facilities on the two chief routes within six months, so that postal contracts can be turned over to private concerns to enable them to maintain a more extensive freight and passenger service. The two airways to be immediately developed are:

The Transcontinental, from New York to Los Angeles and San Francisco by way of Cleveland, Chicago, Iowa City, Des Moines, North Platte (Neb.), Cheyenne, Salt Lake City.

The Southwestern, from Chicago to Dallas by way of Moline, St. Joseph, Kansas City, Wichita, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Fort Worth.

Other airways discussed by Mr. Hoover and the President, which will be developed later, are: the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Great Lakes, the Northwestern, the Mississippi Valley. In three years the Secretary of Commerce expects to have the most complete commercial air service in the world.