Rx from Rick

What's wrong with the airlines? They're too pampered. That is what hard-jawed Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, president of profitable Eastern Air Lines Inc., told the Senate Committee on Interstate & Foreign Commerce last week.

"Air transportation," said Rickenbacker, "is suffering from too much coddling and wet-nursing. More regulation and paternalism are not the cure. The individual carriers need less artificial support, less shielding from the facts of life, and more exposure to the inexorable economic laws that apply to business in general." Rick, who pinches Eastern's pennies until Lincoln's beard hurts, thought the industry needed to "learn the homely virtues of thrift, economy and efficiency, and that one must work if he expects to eat."

Then he ticked off an eleven-point prescription. Sample ingredients: P: Require new carriers to fly the mail at no higher rate than pioneers on the same routes.

P: Prohibit RFC and other Government loans to airlines.

P: Carry all first-class mail by air where delivery would be speeded.

P:Separate Government subsidies from actual airmail pay.

P: Weed out the unfit operators and uneconomic routes.

P: Increase Civil Aeronautics Board salaries and staff.

The Senators sat up and took notice; Airman Rickenbacker made the businesslike kind of sense they wanted to hear. Next day, he followed up his free advice with a dramatic and not entirely disinterested proposal. He offered to take over his competitors--National, Delta, Capital, Chicago & Southern, and Colonial Airlines --and handle all their domestic air mail at Eastern's "non-subsidy" rate of 60/ to 65^ per ton mile (v. the five lines' average which he figured at $4.45 last year). *The difference, said Rick, would save the taxpayers $10 million a year.

Impressed, Colorado's Ed Johnson, Committee chairman, sent Rickenbacker's "phenomenal and challenging" proposal to CAB, whose Chairman Joseph J. O'Connell Jr. does not impress quite so easily. He accused Rickenbacker, in effect, of staging a grandstand play. Putting Rickenbacker's newest offer into practice, said O'Connell, would mean amending the 1938 Civil Aeronautics Act to "create an absolute monopoly of north-south air transportation . . . east of the Mississippi." But Diagnostician Rickenbacker had, at any rate, called attention once more to the fact that since the war he has held the domestic monopoly on the secret of making steady profits.

*CAB's airmail pay rates are fixed partly on the basis of compensation, partly according to the airlines' needs for a subsidy in order to make a reasonable profit. How much of a given rate is compensation and how much is subsidy is not announced by CAB, but the Hoover Commission has urged that such separation be made.

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