AMERICAN AIRWAYS

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 75, 26 September 1933, Page 5

AMERICAN AIRWAYS

RAPID DEVELOPMENT

HALF IS NIGHT FLYING

(From "The Post's" Representative.) NEW YORK, September 2.

Synchronously with the review of the operations of ■ Imperial Airways by a writer in the "Strand Magazine," tho "Scientific American" reviews the progress of United Air Lines, whose services cover 6500 miles, fly 14,000,000 miles annually, and last year carried 90,000 passengers. "Just as it may be said that the first 50,000,000 miles are the hardest, so are they tho slowest," writes Bobert Johnson. "United Air Lines will complete the flying of its second 50,000,000 miles in approximately three years—about half the time required for the present record. Five years ago, and less, the average speed of airline service was 100 miles an hour;, in 1933, tlie average is about 150 miles an hour. Instead of tho 1932 schedule of 27 hours' elapsed time from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the 1933 schedule is approximately 20 hours. New York is now only five hours from Chicago, instead of six and a half." The record of individual pilots is not furnished, so that a comparison with Imperial Airways pilots —with Captain Olley, for instance, who has flown a million miles in the last eight years—is not practicable. Yet the present reviewer claims that 50 per cent, of United's annual flying of 14,000,000 miles is done at night, which, he says, is '' substantially in excess of the night flying of all the European companies combined." Britain is regarded as being in Europe. "Yet another significant lesson," he says, "concerns the one-time theory that pilots reached an age limit, from 32 to 35 years, beyond which their effi-ciency-decreased to a point preventing them from remaining actively in airtransport flying. This theory was exploded by the institution of a policy of examining all members of the pilot personnel by competent flight surgeons every thirty days, •which resulted in their findings that, in most eases, the so-called age limit is considerably higher." In maintaining communications during flight, the radio-telephone is an extremely important factor, and is the key of the plan of traffic regulation. The divisions of the United vary in length from 884 miles to 2030 miles, and coast-to-coast service is maintained by two interlocking divisions, operating the mid-continent airway from New York to Los Angeles—a distance by air of 2760 miles. By means of radio-tele-phone communication between the various machines in flight and the groundtransmitting and receiving stations established every 200 miles, the operations department can bo in constant contact with the crews of tho aircraft, and the position of all machines be known at all points on the transcontinental airway.