The man who had been a top trouble-shooter for the Army's Air Transport Command—and boss of the Hump lifeline into China—last week cheerfully took on more trouble. With the store creases still fresh in his mufti, tall, tough Brigadier General Thomas Hardin went to work as executive vice president of TACA Airways' 13,000 miles of loosely knit air routes south of the border. His first move was to hire four of his top-ranking buddies in A.T.C. to help him run TACA.
To airmen who have seen Tom Hardin in action around the world, this looked as if the bitter struggle in Latin America between Pan American Airways and TACA had reached Armageddon. It also looked as if Transcontinental & Western Air, Inc., which owns 30% of TACA stock, had decided that TACA's President Lowell Yerex needed help in winning the fight.
Rules for Peace. Tom Hardin, who earned his wings in the 101st Aero Squadron in 1917, started out as a barnstormer.
Barnstorming leveled off into serious business in 1927 when Hardin helped found Texas Air Transport, began regular mail & passenger service between Dallas, Brownsville and Galveston.
When American Airlines' fast-growing predecessor, American Airways, swallowed T.A.T.'s successor, Southern Air Transport, in 1929, Hardin became American Airways chief pilot and general manager. Nine years later, a member and later chairman of the Air Safety Board of the Civil Aeronautics Authority, he helped write the safety regulations that made U.S. commercial aviation the safest in the world. Later, for the Defense Supplies Corp. he helped purge Latin American aviation companies of Nazi control, then joined the Air Corps as a lieutenant colonel.
Rules for War. As boss of A.T.C.'s Africa-Middle East Wing he scoffed at dire warnings that planes could not fly 1) through Africa's dreaded dust storms, 2) at night. He did both, stringing radio beacons across thousands of miles of darkest Africa. Result: operating efficiency shot up over 300%— and the accident rate went down. Then he was handed a bigger job : running the lifeline to China over the Hump. There, as in Africa, the big reason for not flying was "weather." So Hardin drafted a curt order: "Effective immediately, there will be no more weather over the Hump."
When pilots were grounded by fierce storms in the mountains, Tom Hardin would often climb into a plane and coolly dive into the weather, frequently went on to Kunming with a vital cargo. Within a year, eight times as much tonnage was being flown into China as when Hardin arrived. Last week Tom Hardin readied a new order: there is no weather in Latin America.