FREIGHT BY AIR

Evening Post, Issue 66, 15 September 1936, Page 8

FREIGHT BY AIR

CANADA'S RECORD

A CURIOUS PARADOX

(From "The Post's" FUpresenUtlve.) VANCOUVER, Auguit 28. Canada may safely claim eminence in Arctic aviation, yet is many years behind the times in inter-urban and transcontinental flying—a paradox that is difficult to understand. In the development of flying services into the remote and inaccessible Northland, airmen last year transported nearly twelve thousand tons of freight, which surpasses the record of the United States, France, and Germany combined. On the other hand, air-mail and passenger service between the main centres of populafen is practically unborn. ' ■ ! Fur, fish, timber* and j minerals, in the North, last year accounted for 120,672 passengers ' flown, compared with Great Britain's tfital of 135,100 passengers during the previous year. I Air mail in Canada, last year, reached a total volume, of five hundred tons; yet it is safe to say that not 2 per cent, of Canada's citizens saw a mail aeroplane in the air during that time. Mail aeroplanes operate to the shores of the Polar Sea, t» lonely Arctic outposts, mining camps, remote from the end of steel, and isolated communities, such as those scattered along the Mackenzie River. { ;

Even though Canada possesses today, completed ana partially completed, a 3000-mile sham of flying fields, under construction since 1929, not a single air liner operates within our borders over an ."all-weather," radio-beam-controlled service, such as has become so common in other parts of the world. Hope of improvement lies in the removal to thsDominion Transport Department of Civil Aviation from the Department of Offence, where it lay, moribund, for sfe long.

From the beginning aviation it Canada has been forced to fly on itiown wings, to maintain and expand it; services, without Government subidy. The pulp and paper companies vere the first to recognise the possibilijes of aviation in the North. Timfercruising air" fleets, organised in 1912, were first in the new field. Then; h 1924, the Ontario Provincial Air Seivice was commissioned to transport a large body of men to the site of a new gold rush at God's Lake, aheid of the freeze-up. Ontario was the: c!adle of Canada's "bush pilot brood," .In 1927, a contract to move. thirty ions, of equipment to a gold mine in Northern Manitoba was carried out by \ne of the greatest North Country puts of all time; Fred Stevenson. Sjfte then the impressive total of sixty m\. lion pounds of freight has been move\ into the mining camps of the North Whole mining plants have been included in the cargoes. Recently the United States newspapers marvelled at the feat of transporting a motor-car by aeroplane over New York City, yet tractors, compressors, hoists, and heavy mine machinery have been commonplace loads for aircraft operating m Northern Canada for seven years. Recently, Canadian Airways accepted a contract for freighting 500 tons of equipment to the Argosy mine, the largest single air-freight contract ever awarded. . The "Flying Box Car" of the Hudson's Bay Company carries seven tons of freight per trip. Week in, week out the "Radium Express" makes its regular 1800-mile flight to Great Bear Lake, hauling a three-ton pay-load, supplies northward,' radium ores southward. ■■:-.'■■

AU the Northern air companies started in a small way. Brintnell, whose aeroplanes carry the rare white and red fox from Coppermine, Cambridge Bay, and Baffin Island, started with one aeroplane. Roy Brown, head of General Airways, vanquisher of Richtofen,- flew an old seaplane on the waterways of Northern Quebec. Starratt, whose company last year handled two million pounds of freight, started with a canoe and forty dollars. Gilbert, F.R.G.S., who flew to the Magnetic Pole and is now on the Arctic run, taught students with a secondhand war-time "bus." No paropered fledgling is flying over the White Silence, The Dominion Government, trailing it, years behind, is now determined to make up some of the leeway, with a promise of a trans-Canada airway from Halifax to Vancouver, long overdue.