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But the predictable development of air craft within the next few years will bring longer airways flights.
Planes now going into production will be able to cruise 10,000 miles without stop.
And no man can say how much that range may be lengthened, with new fuel technologies, perhaps even with electronic transmission of power from ground bases — developments which visionaries like Hal George think completely possible.
When the day of the 10,000-mile plane has fully dawned, aircraft can hop from continent deep into continent. Then the world's airways, over the great circle (shortest) courses, will lie largely across the top of the world, may reach, too, across the Antarctic to the more thinly populated areas of the Southern Hemisphere.
Dream No Longer. To ATCmen such routes are no longer dreams. For months ATC has operated in the worst weather of the north subpolar country, has made operation routine. And no north-route flyer smiles as General George foretells the day when Americans may stop over on world trips in hotels on the Arctic icecaps, or make one-week round-trip business runs to Calcutta, Moscow or Chungking.
Qualified Freedom. So far as airmen are concerned, only one thing can thwart such dreams. It is not the problem of economy of operation, which has been handsomely met already. It is not freight or passenger capacity or comfort. The barrier, if there is one, is in the mind and heart of the world.
To travel the world, and to give transportation the chance to revivify the U.S. as it has done after two other great wars (railroads in the '70s, the automobile after World War I), U.S. aircraft must have the right of passage over the nations of the world, and of landing on their airports. The U.S. must give the same privileges to other nations.
Few airmen believe that such rights should be unrestricted. They see in com plete freedom of the air a great threat to weak countries, through surprise bombing raids over well-scouted territory. But they admit no reason why the nations cannot agree upon limited rights to foreign air lines which will tie the world closer than it has ever been before in trade, and there fore in understanding.
Each nation has plenty of bargaining power in the sovereignty it exercises over its own territory. Most of the great-circle routes from the U.S. to the world's biggest trade centers, for example, pass over Can ada. Many of them pass over China, Rus sia, India. And landing rights for all the world are needed in the smaller countries like Sweden, Belgium, Holland, British Malaya. Egypt — all the places in the world where there is trade, or where trade might be.
To make these arrangements is a problem for diplomats who will have to juggle many intangibles, balance such considerations as the fact that, while the U.S. now has the world's best equipment and the most know-how in worldwide transportation, the other nations still have the bases, still own the air above them.
But to airmen these are details, and details can be worked out. Occupationally impatient, young, and full of the vision of their new world, they wave before diplomats an Air Forces boast: "The difficult we do at once: the impossible takes a little longer."