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Dominion, Volume 38, Issue 20, 18 October 1944, Page 6

No doubt the announcement that five pilots and three flight engineers of the Royal New Zealand Air Force have been rehabilitated into civil aviation positions in Auckland will create much interest among airmen throughout the country. Here is the small beginning of a process which is bound to expand very considerably as the war comes to an end and the great future field of civil aviation is opened for development. Even granting, however, that commercial and private flying have an almost limitless future in this and other countries, their growth here is unlikely to be so rapid as to enable the absorption of more than a minority percentage of qualified Air Force pilots, engineers aud technical experts. The need to rehabilitate themselves without delay will cause most of the remainder to seek other livelihoods. From the point of view of the national interest, with which our air services wit] be increasingly concerned, it is important that the best-qualified men among many hundreds of pilots and technicians, who may wish to adopt Hying as a career, and will therefore be eager to compete for civil positions, be given equal opportunity of selection. There is a tendency at present for the main activity in wartime civil aviation to be concentrated at one end of this Dominion. Apart from other considerations, this may handicap young servicemen in other parts of the country, who are ou the lookout for commercial posts, unless some system of wide selection is en~ couraged, and opportunity given for qualified men to participate in some “programme of training and adjustment” such as that reported to have been embarked upon in the northern city.