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This is Captain Rieber of the Texas Company speaking on board the Dixie Clipper on its initial voyage from New York to Marseilles. What a trip! What a ship! If its motors were only operating on aviation gasoline of the Red Star and Green T, I should feel sure that we would arrive in Lisbon in record time. Even so, we shall be there about 8 o'clock, just 24 hours after leaving Port Washington, N.Y. To think of it, when some 40 years ago I made my first transatlantic voyage, it took 56 days, in a sailing ship, of course, but 6 days is still about the average duration for a crossing of our crack ocean going greyhounds.

This Pan American Airways Company is something. Starting about 12 years ago, it has made the West Indies, Mexico, Central America seem just around the corner, ,and all little South American countries are today in traveltime as near to New York as were our southern states at the time the Pan American was formed. For more than 4 years, it has given us mail and de luxe passenger services to the Far East, and now it is making us think of Europe in the terms of a weekend.

Do we realize and appreciate what this organization has accomplished, not for themselves but for civilization? Think of all the remote and primitive people who have in a few years been given advantages which for hundreds of years they have not been able to create for themselves, and the revenue in trade and commerce, and good will to us exceeds by far all the accomplishments of every convention and junket on record. The Pan American Airways, Inc., deserves the wholehearted financial and moral support of our government and our people. Hats off to Sonny Whitney, Juan Trippe and their entire organization.

Today marks the beginning of a new chapter in the history of Atlantic travel, with great ships of the air, swift, steady, spacious, carrying passengers on a schedule of a day and a night between the United States and Europe. Only a dozen years have passed since the days of Lindbergh, of Chamberlain, of Byrd, yet by an amazing development in plane design, in engine power, in operating technique, and in the magic of radio protection, we have come to the way of a ship in the midst of the sea, an air born ship riding high above the storm, in touch with the coast 2000 miles away, able as it speeds at 3 miles a minute to converse with water-bound liners creeping at one-sixth its pace upon the surface below. When the Dixie Clipper took off on Wednesday afternoon, June 28, from the Port Washington base of Pan American Airways, with the first pay passengers in the North Atlantic heavier-than-air service, it started a cruise in the protecting network of the radio of five nations. By means of the direction finders developed by the engineers of the air line, which has now flown 435,000 passenger miles, its captain in his swivel chair on the port side of the flight deck, receives every 30 minutes reports on his position from the radio officer. Between his post and the pilot's chair, the navigation officer is able through the necromancy of the new technique to plot the plane's course minute by minute at cruising speeds from 150 to 180 miles an hour. The Dixie and her sister clipper blaze along a new trail under the American flag. May they know only happy landings.

Clara Adams.