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HELICOPTER AIR SERVICE PROGRAM     117

cases it would be cheaper to pay a little extra for the cargo helicopter and deliver the load right straight into the steamship which may not even be calling on the port, but may be traveling by.

This gives you a brief idea.  I bypassed the other things because they are certainly being well covered and are well known.  To my mind definitely such shorter distances as, let us say, Washington to New York, and similar - or London-Paris abroad - in the near future would become typical helicopter distances. The travel would be more convenient and faster than anything you can get even if you use supersonic liners.

And the fact that they will unload and liberate a part of the air space at the airport would also be advantageous.

Returning to the subject for a moment of the air space, the advantage of the helicopter is that for regular operation it will call for considerably lesser amounts of air space, and it would not mean half of the air space above the airplane cost, it would mean one-hundredth of the airspace, or something like that.

Consequently very extensive passenger travel to properly located heliports would in the future be entirely feasible and practical.

These things, and these factors, are well known, and I would like therefore to complete my report by mentioning something which may not necessarily be expressed in dollars and cents, but which nevertheless is of tremendous value.

I believe that it may be stated with confidence that the helicopter has proved to be the most efficient and most valuable instrument for saving lives under circumstances where nothing else could do it, and reducing human suffering.  I recently heard a very reliable statement, and information, that as a rule in warfare the injuries of head and stomach resulted in a considerably heavy amount of fatalities. When helicopters were permitted to pick up men at the front and carry them straight to the hospital, the percentage of fatalities was reduced to less than one-quarter of what it was.

The number of lives saved under various emergencies is very considerable. A reliable figure, with the helicopters' arrival on time, is certainly more than 35,000 lives.

The figure for the whole industry, the helicopter industry of the United States - this I must confess is my personal guess - but I firmly believe that the figure of 100,000 would be considerably below what it actually has been.  By this I don't mean people evacuated from some unpleasant situation.  I mean people whose lives have been saved.

The effect of this saving of life, for instance, you can judge from the following: When our helicopters of the Navy, I think mostly, and the Marine Corps and Army, were sent to cooperate with the government in Tampico, Mexico, in times of a flood, they evacuated over 9,000 people from the floods, and a million and a quarter had their lives saved.

At the end of the operation, the mayor of the city of Tampico expressed his deep thankfulness to the pilots and granted them some medals with the inscription: "With eternal thankfulness of the people of Tampico."

He said that the effect of the few days of operation could be hardly paralleled by a hundred years of successful diplomacy between our people.