Expenditure on Harbours

Press, Volume LXXI, Issue 21400, 16 February 1935, Page 12

Expenditure on Harbours

A correspondent signing himself "Timaruvian" assails us vigorously for our recent suggestion, occasioned by the remarks of a member of the Timaru Harbour Board, that there should be some central control of capital expenditure on harbours in order to prevent, not merely wasteful duplication of harbour facilities, but also the over-investment of public money in competing transport undertakings. Our correspondent says very bluntly that our real motive in making the suggestion is a desire to retard the expansion of Timaru harbour and to centralise shipping at Lytleituii. Since the examination of motives cannot advance the discussion, we must be content to draw attention to what we actually did say and did not say. We did not say, for instance, that expenditure on the Timaru harbour should be controlled from the centre and expenditure on the Lyttelton harbour left unregulated; and we did not offer any opinion on the development scheme now being considered by the Timaru Harbour Board. The leading article was a plea in general terms for reduction and rationalisation of public expenditure on transport facilities. It has been shown beyond doubt by the Director of Transport that transport in New Zealand is over-capitalised and that in consequence the transport factor in the overhead costs of industry is too large: and we suggested that this over-capitalisation was due rather to public than to private expenditure. We also pointed out that the usual result of duplication of shipping facilities was to raise shipping freights. If " Timaruvian " feels that these quite general statements are an attack on the Timaru Harbour Board and its policy he evidently has less belief in the value of Timaru as a port than "The Press" has. The gibe in his letter at our attitude towards transport regulation is merely perverse. If he has read intelligently what we have written on this subject he must know that although we have been and are still critical of: the methods of existing transport authorities, we have always accepted the principle that regulation is desirable. ' The Rigid Dirigible America's experiments with rigid dirigibles have cost so m«ny Jives and so much money that the President's decision that the Government will at present have riulhinfi more to do with these craft is easily understood; much more easily understood, indeed, than the panic policy which led Britain to fit-rap the successful MOO and discontinue experiments when the RlOl, n fillip of an entirely different def.ign, crashed on Beauvais Hill. The- History of the big airship in Britain, America, and France is one of failure and of tragedy; since the war nine such craft have been destroyed, and with them have perished 346 men. Of six nations that have set out to develop and use the dirigible five have decided that the cost in lives, if not in money, is too great, and are no longer interested. Only one big airship is to-day in use. The case against the airship seems to be conclusively proved; it would be, but for that one existing representative of the type, the Graf Zeppelin, and its predecessors. Before the RlOl, the Akron, or the

I Macon had ever flown, the Graf Zeppelin had crossed the Atlantic; before any of them had crashed the Graf had flown round the world. For two years now she has been running to a regular schedule backwards and forwards between Friedrichshafen and Rio de Janeiro. Frequently she meets bad weather. Sometimes she goes round it, sometimes there is no alternative to going through it. She has been tested by the winds of the Arctic, and by I a typhoon in the Pacific, and only once, on her first Atlantic crossing, has she been damaged. That was by a storm that made the Mauretania 36 hours late at New York—l2 hours later than the Zeppelin was at Lakehurst. Up to September of last year she had spent 9042 hours in the air covering 570,000 miles, she had carried 10,200 passengers, 25 tons of mail, and 42 tons of freight, and she had made more than 60 ocean crossings. What was more, her operations showed a profit, which cannot be said for any aeroplane line operating over a comparable route. Captain J. A. Sinclair, the latest defender of the airship, quotes these figures in an article in the "Aeroplane," and shows, in addition, that the seven commercial Zeppelins which preceded the Graf were all successful. There can be no luck about that record, which explains why Dr. Hugo Eckener can smile at the pessimism of experts and laymen in other countries, and go cheerfully on with his plans for the commercial operation of the LZ 129, the new Zeppelin which will make its test flights very soon. The history of the Zeppelins is impressive enough to satisfy most reasonable men who examine it that airships can be safe if they follow German construction and handling methods exactly. The airship has many advantages over the aeroplane, notable among them being its safety when a big proportion of its power-plant is not working, and its indifference to ground organisation along the route between its terminal points. These seem sufficient to justify other governments in co-operating with Dr. Eckener—to whose courage and perseverance almost as much as to the old Count's, the world owes its successful airships—in his attempts to prove the commercial worth of the rigid dirigible on - large commercial scale.