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Aviation History
1936
1936 - 1305.PDF
532 FLIGHT. MAY 21, 1936. AT H an A B RM*K British Internal and External Air-Line Developments : The New Empire Plans : Important Extensions E VERY year, without fail, the remark is made that " if com mercial flying does not go ahead now, it never will," and every year, with out fail, the business goes on, new companies arrive and perhaps fade away, and established companies move a little nearer to the millennium when they will all pay their way. Although nobody noticed it, the year 1934 was one of the most important of any from the air transport point of view, for the very excellent reason that at least one unsubsidised operator ran regular services at a profit. During the past year the various problems involved in the planning of our internal routes have been somewhat overshadowed by the magnificence of the Empire and Transatlantic projects. We still await the findings of the Maybury Committee, and the operators still await the discovery of a genuinely internal route over which a pro fitable number of persons are desirous of transportation For the present the holiday and sea-crossing services re main as the most useful on the internal air map. In competition with a highly developed system of railroads, the other services can only be really profitable if they are run either at a very high speed and with tube-like fre quency, or with machines which provide the maximum of comfort coupled with an unusually high payload. Competition Although the publication of Railway Air Services' plans can hardly have come as a complete surprise to anyone who has watched developments, these certainly suggest that the battle for internal traffic has now started in real earnest —with the scales weighted heavily in R.A.S.'s favour. For the rest, British Airways have multiplied their services and left the London-Belfast route ; Blackpool and West Coast Air Services are using D.H. 86s on their Irish Sea services (which have also been multiplied) ; Northern and Scottish have extended to Skye and North and South Uist; Jersey Airways have laid out an aerodrome at Alderney, and are operating between Plymouth and Jersey ; High land Airways should soon be running to Shetland and be tween Glasgow, Perth, and Inverness; Aberdeen Airways plan to go south to Hull and north to Shetland ; Crilly Air ways, who have a particularly useful travel voucher scheme, now reach Plymouth ; and the balance of the com panies carry on with an unshakable belief that the public will eventually use the air for all fast journeys. Meanwhile, the charter companies, and, in particular, those with regular contracts from newspapers and others, Imperial Airways photograph. continue to be the only people who are able to gauge their returns with reasonable accuracy—for the simple reason that they fly to order. There have been several interesting developments as far as Continental services are concerned. Imperial Air ways have waived their claim to a subsidy on routes north of a line between London and Berlin. British Airways were given both a mail contract and a subsidy for a ser vice to Scandinavia—presumably on condition that they left Belgium, where they have already spent quite a lot of money. There was a certain amount of bad feeling about this Government assistance, as another company, British Continental Airways, had already signified its intention of running over the same route, and a third company, British Scandinavian Airways, is expecting to start a direct ser vice to Copenhagen in the near future. British Airways, incidentally, have taken over Crilly's Lisbon project, which will come to life as scon as permission has been obtained to fly over, and land in, France. Early last year Imperial Airways opened a weekly service to Rome and Brindisi. The Atlantic Project The year's high spot, of course, has been the publication of the new Empire and Transatlantic service plans. These have brought us back," for political and economic reasons, to the old idea of using flying boats almost exclusively on the long-distance routes, and twenty-nine big machines are now in course of construction—apart from the new fleet of landpianes which are also being made in readiness for the 1937 programme. To a large extent the new routes have been surveyed, though it is still doubtful whether the Australian section will be covered by boats, since the Australian Government have been in opposition to the idea. So far as Africa is concerned, South African Air ways have already taken over the last section of the Cape service, and-in due course the Empire boat terminus will be at Durban. Three separate schemes are being worked out for the Transatlantic crossing, and this service will eventually he run in conjunction with Pan-American Airways. Azores-Bermuda route does not involve such long hops, and this may be used for the east-to-west crossing and if all winter operations, while it remains to be seen how the Short-Mayo composite project works out in actual prac tice. In this case the crossing will be made direct.
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