At a secret airport in India, a flight of pot-bellied new U.S. air freighters settled on the runways, waddled up to the parking line, disgorged their cargo through yawning doors in their fuselages. As American airmen watched this sight last week, they caught a glimpse of a bright postwar world.
Less than five days before, those freight ers had been loaded in the U.S. Crack air line pilots, to whom ocean-flying had be come routine, had taken them across 15,-ooo miles of war-char ted airways with no more trouble than they once hauled mail and passengers between New York and Chicago. It was the biggest mass freight flight in aviation history. And although its total freight load was only 90 tons, airmen knew that when peace comes that load could be multiplied almost indefinitely.
All that will be needed to increase air freight tenfold, or a thousandfold, when peace comes, are more and bigger planes and an understanding among nations. Aviation can guarantee the planes. Some of them, like Consolidated's new 400-passenger transport, are on the drafting boards. The tremendous rest is up to the world's statesmen.
So far as airmen are concerned, aviation's blueprint of international air routes will be the blueprint of peace.
Fortune of War. As it had often done before, war had forced the making of this pattern for peace. And by the fortune of war it is U.S. flyers who have had the big gest part in creating that pattern.
Thus it fell to a. professional soldier to lead them. The world's No. 1 transport airman today is Major General Harold Lee George, boss of the Army Air Forces' burgeoning Air Transport Command.
As his freighters droned toward India, last week, at his desk in ATC's homely headquarters at Washington's Gravelly Point, Hal George watched their progress from radio reports, ran his bright blue eyes over many another operations report — from New York to Cairo to Chung king, from Nashville across the Pacific to Port Moresby, New Guinea. He also found time to discuss his favorite topic: the limitless sky.
As he spoke, there was a transformation. The quietly efficient officer became the eloquent apostle of air power, for war and peace, voicing his creed and its docu mentation in eager New England ac cents.
Mission for Peace. An aide brought him a message. The White House wanted an itinerary arranged immediately to put Emissary Joseph Davies in Moscow. That would be something more than a routine job, for ATC's scheduled operation runs to the gates of Russia but does not enter.
General George's precisely articulated sentences were scarcely interrupted. He scribbled a note, went on. An hour later the aide reported that all arrangements for the trip had been made.
Two years ago such an assignment would have called for weeks of preparation. That ATC could put it through now with such swift efficiency was the result of many providential circumstances. One of them is that the wide-open spaces of the U.S. had given it the finest domestic and ocean air-transport system in the world.