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UNITED STATES 
DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR
NATIONAL PARKS SERVICE
WASHINGTON

December 30, 1935

Memorandum for Mr. Demaray, Mr. Wirth, Mr. Tolson, and Mr. Moskey:

Yesterday in reading the hearings on the airport bill involving airplanes and airport facilities in Washington, I ran across the following reference to pages 115 and 116 of the Report of the Federal Aviation Commission, issued January 1935:

"(38) It should be the policy of the Federal agencies concerned to provide airports and glider sites in or adjacent to recreational areas under Federal control, such as national parks and monuments. 
"Though we are recommending against Federal aid to airports for municipalities, we feel that every effort should be made to provide thoroughly adequate facilities on Federal property and particularly in areas offering exceptional attractions for the aerial tourists. Several witnesses have urged, and we believe their view to a perfectly reasonable one, that nothing would. be more helpful in developing private flying and so in pushing the new industry of building aircraft in quantities off its present virtual dead center than a more general dispersion of airports in the places to which private pilot might be expected to want to go. The national parks and monuments are perfect cases in point. Almost without exception they include an elaborate provision for the comfort and safety of the visitor by motor. It seems to us thoroughly appropriate that some modest attention should be given to the visitor by air. There need to be no great elaboration of airport facility, but there should be a landing strip of some kind. 
"There are two purposes to be served by the building of airports on Federal lands. The first is to make new attractions available to the aerial tourist, gradually increasing in numbers. The other is to protect the safety of all travelers by air by providing suitable emergency landing areas in large regions of rugged terrain or heavily wooded and therefore exceptionally dangerous for flying. The Department of Commerce has constructed some hundreds of intermediate landing fields along transport airways, but there are still great areas of country in which no sort of a safe landing place exists and over which aircraft may have frequent occasion to pass. 
"The C.W.A. airport program of a year ago was a great assistance, but its operations had to be limited almost entirely to the neighborhood of towns, where unemployment relief was needed and where the local government could undertake to maintain the airport after it was built. It has occurred to us that the work now being done by the Civilian Conservation Corps would fit in admirably with a recognition of the need for such emergency landing areas, and we accordingly recommend that the various units of the Corps stationed in areas where no suitable landing places not exist should undertake to prepare them in the near future.