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102    HELICOPTER AIR SERVICE PROGRAM

that you have toward the future of helicopters, particularly in the last statement:

Let us not lightly discard a vehicle which requires so little investment in roadbed or terminal. Let us have a little more patience with a program, which has a definite termination date, to see if the promises will turn into the reality.

The potential is the development of a new industry and a major breakthrough in urban traffic strangulation.

I am very much in agreement with your statement except in that part where it comes to pick up a little bit of the tab, for maybe the peanuts that went with the cocktails on the fancy filet mignon service that we receive on transcontinental jets.

When we get through, we find the powerful ATA, the fountainhead of all the airlines which, last year, had $400 million in cash flow, and about $200 million in profits, and, this year, will probably exceed $250 million in profits, all of this done with very fine tax position that your fine association has been very instrumental in helping them to maintain, and which has been supported by this committee to a considerable degree.

All of this prosperity with a rate that has failed to come down with the learning curve and the great experience that you have had with your subsonic jets, and all of this with the investment of some perhaps $1.5 billion in subsonic planes that we are asking perhaps the Federal Government to make so that we can get people there faster and so you can fly around the world and serve tired scrambled eggs and canned orange juice instead of breast of pheasant.

There will be breakfast at every landing and takeoff. Now we are asking somebody to pick up the tab for the peanuts with ATA looking the other way. I am somewhat disappointed. I would like to have your comment. I am surprised to learn that on a $110 helicopter fare from downtown New York that the airlines are picking up $9.50 of that.

Mr. TIPTON. Mr. Chairman, you have given me a great deal to comment upon. Let me talk a little bit about--

Senator MONRONEY. Let's have some plan talk because we are all a part of the family in aviation. I quite agree with your closing phrase that this baby brother is still a blood brother of aviation.

I can remember the time of the vast subsidies that our Government paid out to our present rather fat trunklines and that we even subsidized the limousine fare. We didn't have buses in those days. 

If a fellow wanted to ride the airlines, he was picked up at his home in a limousine and he was taken out to the airport. Maybe it was just a grass pasture in those days, but he got a free ride.

This went on Uncle Sam's tab. It didn't go on the fledging lines that were then practically 80 or 90 percent dependent on Federal subsidy. As it worked its way off, of course, obviously, I h=think the Federal Government and the lines agreed that the people ought to pay their own transportation to and from the airport, and so it wasn't too hard to get limousine operations that were paid for by the customer.

Certainly we run into an impasse, at least, politically, today, on continuation of any helicopter service unless something rather drastic is devised. I would like to have your comment on this long and rather rambling comment by the Chairman.

Mr. TIPTON. First I would like to say a few words about airline money. I guess I have been in the business for 27 years now and all