AERIAL TRAVEL

Greymouth Evening Star, 21 April 1938, Page 9

AERIAL TRAVEL

BARGAINS FOR WIVES. An unportentous enough light glowed on the switchboard of an American Airline’s office, says the “Christian Science Monitor,” and when the operator answered, a woman’s voice said, sternly and without preamble, ‘My husband is on his way to your office You’ll know which one he is, when hi gets there, because he looks like Huck Finn, running away from home He has to go to Chicago on business, and he’s got a notion he wants to fly. He doesn’t want to fly. Or perhaps I should say that he’s not going to fly. Our family has travelled on the ground for years, and we can continue to do so. Kindly do not sell him a ticket to fly to Chicago or anywhere else. Thank you. Goodbye.” Multiply the general outlines of this brisk ultimatum by several thousand, over a period of years, and you have one reason why the major airlines lately announced that, for a limited period, wives whose husbands buj' tickets to fly on business trips, could travel along with their husbands free of charge. The geographical limits of the offer were originally set for short trips as between New York Albany, Buffalo, Boston, and Chicago, but such was the response to the offer that the territory was extended from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast. it has been axiomatic ever since air transport began really to find its — well, air legs—that, for every ten women who would allow their husbands, and sons, and brothers, to fly, there were ten who said flatly, “No.” The deliberate programme of wifeeducation began with United Airlines and Transcontinental and Western Airlines, out on the Pacilic Coast, offering free trips for wives of regular patrons between San Francsico and Los Angeles. American Airlines fell quickly into line vzith offers of free trips between New York, Boston, Buffalo, and Washington to holders of travel cards between the given dates. That meant offering free trips to the women folk of approximately 10,000 regular patrons of the line, but January, February, and March are lighter months, and the line could afford to do il. Eatsern Airlines followed suit, notwithstanding that these particular months are not light with Eastern, due to southern resort schedules. All kinds of theories are bandied around in the airlines offices, as to what started the wives up like coveys of partridge, at the call for a free ride. Some of the airline officials don’t believe it yet. “Yesterday they not only wouldn’t fly themselves—they wouldn’t let their husbands fly, if they could help it. And to-day—why it just can't be!”

But it is. Even the ordinary taciturn Irishman who drives one of the limousines between Vanderbilt Avenue in New York and Newark Airport, can spot them at ten paces. He looks at the night plane down from Boston, grins slightly, and says, "Uh-huh; five of ’em to-night.” Miss Patricia O’Malley, of American Airlines, thinks the' plan has set off the bargainining instinct in women. “Show women a bargain, and they’ll forget their prejudices. They’ve had the idea all along that air transport was the expensive kind of transportation.”