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The Air Line Industry Today
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prolonged hearings by the committees on interstate commerce of the House of Representatives and the Senate at the past session of Congress. I refer to the two companion bills, Senate Bill No. 2 and House of Representatives Bill No. 7273. What, in brief, do those bills provide?

Provisions of Present Bills
The general scheme of these bills is to extend to the air transport industry the system of government control first perfected in the case of the railroads, and more recently extended to the motor carriers and to the telephone, telegraph and radio industries. This system of control comprises regulation of rates, both maximum rates to protect the public from overcharges, and minimum rates to prevent rate wars; provision that no operation may be conducted without a certificate that the public convenience and necessity so require; abolition of the system of mail contracts and authorization to the Post Office Department to transport mail over the liens of any carrier holding an appropriate certificate at rates of pay to be fixed by the Interstate Commerce Commission; and control by the Commission over accounting, the issuance of securities, acquisitions of control, mergers and combinations, and over trade agreements which must be approved by the Commission.
All of these matters, quasi-judicial in character, are placed under the control of an independent non-partisan commission. At the same time, the purely administrative controls over the air transport industry — primarily matters of safety and postal administration — are left in the Department of Commerce and the Post Office Department, where they now stand.
Until legislation such as S.2 and H.R.7273 or their equivalent is enacted, far-sighted business planning in the air transport industry cannot be justified and will not occur, nor will America's air transport industry be capable of fulfilling its allotted role in our scheme of national defense. The future of America in the air demands this action.

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