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a rate of 25 cents, she would wave me aside with the devastating comment that the insurance companies were only interested in making money. 
And so they are. When insurance companies, by careful calculation, find that they can make money by the sale of insurance to cover this or that contingency we may be sure that the contingency is remote indeed. There is no truer indication of the safety of travel by rail than the insurance policy, at a low premium, which may be purchased in any railroad station. For over a year the insurance companies have made available to every traveler on the scheduled air lines the same sort of policy. The air passenger can buy an even more liberal $5,000 policy at a rate which is almost exactly the same as that available to the rail passenger. So insurance companies have passed judgement upon the safety of travel by air, just as they have upon the safety of travel by rail, and they have not found it wanting. Carefully have they investigated, conservatively have they calculated, and they have ascertained that travel by scheduled air lines is today so safe that they can insure any passenger of the air lines at any time on a rate basis strictly comparable to that prevailing for the rail passenger. 
And we find that our own air passengers have such complete confidence in the safety of their travel that only about one in ten bother to pick up these inexpensive policies. 
Thus our enthusiastic air passengers, increasing by the thousands as each month goes by, the appropriately cautious insurance companies, the conservative banking houses, and the great Congress of the United States have joined in affirming that air transport is a regular, established, dependable, modern mode of travel. This judgement is amply supported by cold statistics. To show you how rapidly our record of safety is going upward, I need only refer you to the figures issued by the Government which disclose that during the three winter months just passed our safety record jumped by 853 percent over the record of a year ago — and the winter of a year ago had been the best in our history. Furthermore, during those same months the four largest air lines in this country flew 50,000,000 passenger miles without a single accident — in fact without so much as a single forced landing. And one of our large air lines is today approaching 500,000,000 passenger miles without a single fatality to passengers or crew or persons on the ground. 
The air lines have made their extraordinary record by dint of rigid adherence on the part of management to the strictest, most conservative operating standards. These standards have secured a body of men who pilot your planes unerringly to port — yours is indeed a port of which to be proud — and who are second to no other group in all the world. Clean

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