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HELICOPTER AIR SERVICE PROGRAM      45

Incidentally, speaking of Los Angeles, I, too, have lived there and I believe that there was some confusion about Senator Murphy's testimony as to how long it takes to get from various points in Los Angeles to the airport. I think he said that from his home, which happens to be near the freeway, he could get to the airport in, I think he said between 17 to 21 minutes. That is most unusual situation, a the time of day he was describing.

My own experience is that it often takes that much time to get from the airport to the freeway, or from the freeway to the airport.

He later cited some times such as an hour and a half to Anaheim and San Bernardino, which I think are typical times.

The fact is, however, that the Los Angeles Airport people are here, and I would urge the committee to find out exactly what the times from various points are, so as to give the committee a full record rather than just a special particular trip.

The fact is, as we looked ahead, the time from the city center - you might call it the Union-Station-to-Union-Station time, or the portal-to-portal time - is now changing in a very bad direction.

We may soon, within the next 10 years, be able to fly from New York to Los Angeles, and Los Angeles to New York, in less time than it now takes to get from the city center to the respective airports. So that in 1975, unless we do a lot of things about this interurban and urban transportation problem, the time from the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles to the Biltmore Hotel in New York may be composed of 45 minutes on the ground to the seat of the airplane, an hour and thirty minutes in the airplane, and 45 minutes from the seat of the airplane to the hotel downtown, and we may be lucky to make it in 45 minutes on the ground at each end.

So the problem is to realize the potentiality of transportation and to break out of the tyranny of traffic on the ground.

I think that this instrument authorization is going to help. We have gone a long way to approve a special one-shot only navigation system for the New York Airways operation. Because the weather is relatively better in San Francisco, they have not sought instrument flight rules authorization, nor have they equipped for it. So they haven't had to spend some $70,000 per airplane for stability augmentation and other instrumentation. They don't need to because their completion record is quite good due to mechanical improvements and due to very infrequent weather interruptions.

In some months in New York, however, 25 percent of the flights are required to be canceled on account of smog, fog, and other weather problems. Therefore, in 1966, there is likely to be a much better completion record even in those bad months as New York Airways and proves that it can run schedule with so-called instrument flight operations.

The fact is, among all three of these carriers, excluding San Francisco, there is a completion record of about 90 percent, and this has deterred passengers. It wasn't the cost alone. It was the question also of whether or not the aircraft would actually take off.

They eschewed the faster transportation and took the slower because of reliability. We think these authorizations which we have been able to give confidently and prudently will enhance the reliability and, therefore, not only increase the revenues but increase the number of passengers coming to the helicopter.