THE RACE FOR AIR SUPREMACY

In a world which has seen history hinge so often upon the control of the seas and the superiority of one nation's merchant marine over another this comparatively new element through which international commerce is beginning to flow, the air, should have careful consideration. There was a time when Yankee clipper-ships sailed the seas in numbers that were symbols of commercial prestige and potential naval power, but the advent of the steamship found America napping, and today most of our trade is carried on in foreign bottoms. If the United States does not soon establish a definite air-schedule across the Atlantic to Europe, she may very likely find herself again outclassed--this time by an air-minded Germany.

Up to last year the four competitors in the race for the honor and profit of promoting the first transatlantic airline between Europe and North America have been England, France, Germany, and the United States, but the former two have been forced into the background because of technical difficulties. On May 6 the new German dirigible, Von Hindenburg, will inaugurate a regular North Atlantic service between Frankfort and Lakehurst. No one can deny that this link in the chain of transportation around the world is a vastly more important one than the recently initiated transpacific airline of Pan American Airways. In August the German Lufthansa expects to make its first trial flights across the North Atlantic by airplane for the carrying of mail. Already German airplanes monopolize the South Atlantic route over which they have made 125 flights in two years without a single accident, and have carried over 7,000,000 letters.

From a strategical standpoint the promotion of an American transatlantic airline as a war-defensive measure is highly desirable. An English historian once remarked, "On the day that Bleriot flew the English Channel England became a continental nation." It might be said with equal truth that the day Charles A. Lindbergh flew the Atlantic Ocean, the United States became a European power. Few events in aeronautical history are more strikingly significant than the landing of a whole squadron of Italian planes under the command of General Italo Balbo in the very heart of America at Chicago three years ago. If the United States is to remain one of the great air powers, both in commercial and military strength, the enterprise she has shown in the Caribbean and Pacific aviation problems must be continued across the Atlantic.