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our average stage of length is fourteen miles and our average charge to the passenger is currently 67 cents a seat a mile. Our direct operating cost per available seat ,Gile has been reduced from 47 cents to 15-1/2 cents and, with the inauguration of IFR operations which we now forecast for January 1965, will show a still greater reduction. With the introduction into service of the new turbine powered helicopters the subsidy as a percentage of total operating revenues has already dropped from 65.8% to 43.8%.
It is unfortunate in the extreme that the truly remarkable economic achievements of the helicopter industry are being judged at a time when the older and more mature elements of the air carrier industry have, after a long period of development, attained relative economic self-sufficiency, or at least stability. However, this is the fact. In any case, it seems to have been inevitable that inter-city travel by air should reach a certain stage of development before there was any compulsion to consider ways and means of expediting the surface portion of an air hourney. For this reason alone the role of the present helicopter carriers must, therefore, be viewed in the context of providing services which are required as a result of the advance in air transport as a whole. In other words, the helicopter carriers must be considered as a component in the whole task of expediting travel by air from point of origin to