BOOKS Or THE DAY
The Future of Civil Aviation
Civil Aviation and Peace. By J. Parker Van Zandt (Faber and Faber. 5s.1
DR. VAN ZANDT has written for the Brockings Institution at Wash- ington another useful book which, if it (naturally) sees the subject from the American angle, is for that very reason the more worthy of attention in Great Britain and the Commonwealth. It puts clearly and cogently the case for freedom versus control of international air transport. He examine; a number of proposals made from time to time for internationalisation or international control, and shows that, apart from their being unacceptable, at any rate to a number of the Powers, they were in themselves open to some serious objections. He criticizes inter alia the system analysed in Sir Osbert Mance's recent study undertaken for Chatham House—a system involving the institution of an international authority to control the principal air services, to issue licences for air-lines, and, in general, to do more or less what Kipling's A.B.C. did in With the Night Mail. "The evidence is overwhelming," says Dr. Van Zandt, " that international supervision of civil aviation on the scale called for is utterly im- practicable. There is not the slightest prospect of its universal acceptance. Certainly the United States, for one, would reject it categorically. . . . If the right to work of every pilot, plane owner, and airport mechanic at every crossroad in America is to depend on a licence—based on international ' quotas ' or some such complex formula—issued by a world body with authority overriding that of the Federal Government and the forty-eight States, our people would ask in dismay whether we had won or lost this war."
That forecast was made before the Chicago Conference met in November, 1944, and the results of that Conference as embodied in the agreements signed on December 7th amply confirm it. The Western Hemisphere, broadly, and not it alone, showed that it had no use for. even the comparatively moderate scheme of international control which the British delegation submitted. Internationalisation Met with a decided set-back at Chicago. Dr. Van Zandt shows that we need not shed many tears over its fate. He is clearly of opinion that it is on the whole better dead. Many people will agree with him.
Dr. Van Zandt puts international air transport into proper per- spective in relation botit to aviation in general and to defence. It is not the most important element in civil aviation. Scheduled air services throughout the world are predominantly domestic, and the non-scheduled services, which are essentially domestic, are likely to be of much greater volume than the scheduled if the " automatic trends " are reproduced in air travel and transport. It will be from the carriage of passengers, not of freight,. that air transport com- panies, unlike shipping companies, will earn their living. The development of air travel is therefore the essential need, and it can come only under a regime of free enterprise. The military importance of international air transport has been grossly exaggerated. Milit aviation plays the primary role in air power. Civil aircraft cann be converted readily into efficient fighting machines. They could be used in war for transport—and would be useful to that extent, but nothing can be done about it. No scheme for preventing them front being so used is practicable. And if a practicable scheme could be found, it would have not much bearing upon the problem of defence and security. Dr. Van Zandt advocates what he calls a " program of maximum use." The realisation of it should make possible, he calculates, a three-cent fare per passenger-mile between the United States and anywhere in the world. At that rate a return ticket by air from Chicago to Edinburgh, he says, would cost $zoo, which is one-third the first-class fare by surface travel—and, of course, the time saved is money saved as well. A " program of maximum use " should result, too, in the establishment in time of a great network of air- ways which would be a positive contribution to peace, whose cause would also be served in other ways by the development of aviation which the absence of strangling controls and restrictions will make possible. All democratic non-aggressor nations have a vital stake in the fostering of the basic elements of air-power along these lines. The policy involved is the positive side of that wider policy of which the aerial disarmament of the aggressor nations is the negative side. It is wholly incompatible with a policy of international control and limitation. " They (restrictive measures) would prove as impotent for defensive purposes as a Maginot Line. They would retard civil progress, restrict employment, and restrain the rapid expansion of
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