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36       U.S. AIR SERVICES       November, 1931

lations, reasonably well enforced and sensibly observed, are making airports somewhat safer, I believe, than the ordinary city street. I know that since the city of Los Angeles came into control of The Los Angeles Airport three years ago, the one fatal accident that has occurred on the field resulted from an un-authorized flight in a homemade plane which had come over from another city to try some speed experiments on the spacious area of our port. Other than this we have had scarcely any mishaps of any serious consequences whatever. This despite a record of something more than 7,000 airplane landings a month, representing many thousands of flight hours and tens of thousands of flight miles. 

But airport development has only commenced to take into account all of the factors of safety with which it must become familiar. I should like to summarize these briefly under five headings, having to do respectively with location, surroundings, equipment, regulations, and personnel. 

To attain a maximum of safety, airports must be permanently located on areas of adequate size, with favorable meteorological conditions, and suitable terrain. These points are seldom sufficiently recognized by private business leaders or public officials who may have something to do with the selection of an airport site. They are, of course, commonplace requirements to the person experienced with aviation, but even he, I fear, is likely to neglect them in favor of other considerations which have to do with immediate economy. Hence it can do no harm to mention them here in detail. 

Permanence of location is of importance because we cannot visualize any corporation or city adequately equipping an airport on a tract which it holds merely by a short-term lease, or where the land investment may soon come into the competition with the improvement investment and tend to close out the latter.  We need more airports which will stay put --which we may look forward to as established institutions of public service ten, twenty-five, and fifty years hence. Permanence inevitably means care and foresight in development, with all the consequent significance to safety. 

AS TO size, I feel that it is folly to locate airports these days where all-way landing is not feasible, and where prepared runways of about 5,000 feet in length cannot be developed. While a 2,500-foot runway is sufficient for most purposes at the present time, an additional distance of 500 or 1,000 feet is demanded by safety, and the present trends in aircraft construction demand that we should be able to extend the surfaced landing and take-off areas beyond 4,000 feet if we expect to take care of future traffic with safety.  Already there is record of transport ships overshooting their fields with disastrous consequence which might have been avoided by a wiser selection of airport site.

As to soil and drainage conditions, I shall say little here. The relation of these to safety is well known, and I am justified in the present discussion in simply asserting that if, for reasons of economy and otherwise, a site is selected where soil and drainage are poor, then it must be taken into account from the start that a sufficient expenditure must be allowed for to repair these defects in the natural location. Here, again, I am simply insisting that we have no right to sacrifice safety to economy if we expect to make aviation a dependable and respectable business of commercial transportation.

TURNING to meteorological conditions, we have a factor which no amount of subsequent expenditure can adjust. Conditions of a meteorological sort vary widely within short distances, and this fact must be understood. Even within the environs of a single city, a considerable range of weather and atmospheric conditions may be found. No company and no community can afford, from the standpoint of safety alone, to locate its airport at places where conditions are not the best to be had as regards moderateness and constancy of wind, absence of smoke and fog, and mildness of temperature. Moreover, I heartily endorse the suggestion that, once a large community has located and equipped one major airport with due regard to these factors, it may well afford to create one or more auxiliary landing fields, with sufficient runway areas only, to take care of emergency operations when weather at the major airport may render it unsafe.  

As a final word on the subject of location, I may speak of the need for selection of airport sites where there is a minimum of natural, or unremovable artificial, obstruction in the surrounding area. Darkness occupies about half of every twenty-four hours, and even the best located airport is destined to have some thick weather at times. The airport which is so located that an approaching ship cannot swing in a circle of from three to five miles to get its bearing is distinctly handicapped from the standpoint of safety. If an unobstructed circle of from eight to ten miles radius is possible without crashing against a mountain side, so much the better. Where a city can so place its airport, or a transport company can so choose its terminal facilities that this freedom is possible, it becomes criminally negligent with the first crack-up if ti has done otherwise.

THIS brings us to consideration of my second main topic, that of the relation of airport surroundings to safety. An airport is inviting trouble when it locates where tall buildings, chimneys, gas tanks, power lines, oil derricks, and the like either exist or are likely to be constructed in its immediate vicinity. Careful flying, it is true, can ordinarily avoid such hazards, but hazards they are none the less, and as such they are menaces to aerial navigation which should never be permitted in the neighborhood of any airport. This means nothing more nor less than that airport sites must be chosen in unobstructed sections, and then that the territory surrounding these sites must be kept under restriction as to the types of construction permitted within a radius of perhaps two miles from the center of the port. Of course, if the port itself has an area of a mile square or more, the amount of territory outside the port which must be restricted is proportionately less. 

As to methods by which such restricting control may be exercised, let me call your attention first to the recently developed legal doctrine of excess condemnation. The older legal process by which the right of eminent domain has been exercised to acquire property for public benefit has limited such acquisition to the tract actually needed for the proposed undertaking. Legislative provision for excess condemnation