NEW AIR LINES

Ellesmere Guardian, Volume LXI, Issue 14, 20 February 1940, Page 2

NEW AIR LINES

JAPANESE SERVICES IN CHINA

EXTENSION MADE TO BANGKOK (SI AM)

Approval has been given by three Japanese supported regimes— the Peiping Provisional Government, the new Nanking Government, and the Federated Autonomy Government of Mongolia—of the charter for a China Airways Company, semi-official firm designed to monopolise the aviation business in Japanese-occupied areas of China. This company, capitalised at 50,----000,000 yen (about £3,000,000). is to start air services between Shanghai and Canton, Dairen, Tsi'ngtao, and Kaifeng, as well as between Peiping and Hankow, Hangchow and Nanking, and other lines. It will also operate existing lines between Shanghai and. Peiping, Shanghai and Hankow, Peiping and Paotow. says the Christian Science Monitor.

Japan's new air service from Tokyo to Bangkok, Muang Thai (Siam), and the Chinese-Russian line just inaugurated between Chungking and Moscow, carry an important phase of the struggle for dominance in East Asia into the air. Wings offer one way out to a China whose land communications bear the brunt in Japan's latest strategy of cutting China off from the outside world. Russia, still an enigma in Far Eastern affairs, is helping China hold open an aerial back door.

Japan, unwilling to grant reciprocal privileges in its own Empire to foreign air services, but intent on commanding China from the skies, has dodged British Hong Kong in favour of Bangkok as a terminus for the southern line.

As a result of the Japan-Muang Thai aviation agreement, Japan Air Transport is to fly • a twinengined "made in Japan" plane on regular schedule to Bangkok. The Tokyo press has been most en-

thusiastically acclaiming the Siamese capital as the "aerial hub of the Par East."

While the new scheme makes an interesting change in the Far East aviation picture, Hong Kongwill still claim the honour so freely handed over by the Japanese to Bangkok. For although connections may be made at Bangkok for Europe and the South Seas, Bangkok is ho better in that respect than Hong Kong, while the latter port additionally has the important trans-Pacific line to California and likewise connection with two Chinese airlines leading not only to Chungking with its Moscow service, but now linking to a hew Burma line which will give an Asia overland short-cut to Europe.

Even Bangkok's direct connection with Japan will be reduced in importance within the near future, if. as planned, the Japanese send a new airline southward from Shanghai to Canton which is in close proximity to Hong Kong even if the Japanese fail to negotiate a landing agreement with Britain—a thing they are unlikely to arrange because the British would certainly demand reciprocity, and it is against Japanese policy to let foreign commercial planes fly into Japan on regular schedules.

It is a point of some interest that the Japanese intend to fly a Japanese-manufactured plane on the Bangkok run. This may be a Japanese assembled plane fabricated, in America or elsewhere. a

plane similar to some American or other craft and manufactured in Japan under patent purchase, or

actually a truly all-Japan plane— in which case it is safe to say that it will be a fairly close copy of some foreign design, for Japanese engineers have not disclosed sufficient training- and experience to originate .anything really new in the twin-engined transport field. Nevertheless they are decidedly the foremost plane constructors in the Far East and they show intense interest in such new models as the four-engined tricycle-landing gear transport just purchased from America for 700,000 dollars,