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44       HELICOPTER AIR SERVICE PROGRAM

100,000 flights; 0.182 fatal accidents.  During the same period, among the helicopters there have been approximately 1 million flights, with an accident rate of 1.1 accidents per 100,000 flights, and 0.20 fatal accidents per 100,000 flights.  The safety record, then, is one which the industry, pilots, labor, management, and Government can take some real pride in.

It is not perfect, but it is comparable to the fixed-wing record, and I guess there has been a price to pay for this level of safety.

Some of our regulations, some of our certification and operating requirments [[requirements]], have added substantially, in some cases, to the costs of operating these vehicles.

The market for the helicopter is one that has not yet been brought out, and which I would like to mention in passing.  Of the total number of passenger-miles, billions of passenger-miles that are traveled within and between cities, some 700 billion passenger-miles in the year 1962, only about 4.5 percent were carried by air; some 31 billion.

The other common carriers carried a few passengers, too, a few passenger-miles.  But the total potential market is some 20 times what is now going by air.

So that these men who worked so hard in this pioneering field still have a very large markets to capture. 

The automobile, of course, carried some 90 percent of the intercity traffic, and the rail and bus and sea are all now lower than the airplane.

Assuming that the President's decision is carried into action, the questions raised by this committee chairman at the beginning of the hearing seemed to me to be worth the real attention of the committee.  To the question asked this morning: Does the end of the Federal subsidy mean the end of all helicopter service?  I think the answer is "No, is does not."

The San Francisco experiment operating over special terrain having come into the market at a favorable time and it literally leapfrogged and worked off the back of the carriers, shows some positive progress and I think it means that the industry and the Government must work a lot harder on this to find new ways of assuring a continued growth and development of this part of the Nation's transportation service.  There are a number of things that could be done by the Federal Government, by State and local governments, by other segments of the aviation industry, even other governments around the world, and finally, most importantly, by the helicopter carrier themselves.

I think there are a number of improvements that we can realistically expect in the next few years that will result in improved services at lower operating costs.

Clearly the introduction of the twin-engine turbine-powered helicopter, plus recent developments in airborne and ground-based instrumentation, have made instrument, nearly all-weather, operations possible for the first time.

For example, last Friday we were able to authorize Los Angeles Airways to proceed into the first phase of their instrument flying. It has been a long time, hard struggle for them to get themselves, and for the Government to understand and help them get themselves in a position with equipment, pilot training and proven operation so that they can climb up through and let down through the clouds in the vicinity of Los Angeles International Airport.