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TO ALL MEMBERS       -10-      February 16, 1943

is a division that will be organized along the lines of the former Air Safety Board in the Civil Aeronautics Administration. Its duties will be to investigate accidents, with the view of devising ways and means of preventing them. 

DEBUNKING
I have been in aviation for upwards of 25 years. As a matter of fact, I was first "bitten by the bug" while attending a Count Fair in 1912. Never, during all my years in the business--and I have been in practically all branches of it-- can I remember hearing the volume of just plain bunk that is being passed out today. It goes beyond the point of being disgusting. Here are some samples. "Post war aviation will fill the Heavens, and as far as the human eye can see there will be nothing but planes, planes, planes....... When the war ends, military aircraft plants will retool over night and start building air transports, and they won't be able to keep up with their orders....... Global flying....... Flying in the stratosphere....... Flying over the North Pole....... Long strings of freight gliders being towed cross-country....... Airways being done away with and everybody flying by the great circular routes....... Laws and regulations by the gross being proposed." 

Washington is ringing with speeches about the future of commercial and civil aviation. It is supposed to furnish employment for all the unemployed after the war, and so on and goes the slicing of the bologna, and that is just about what at least 90 per cent of it amounts to -- just bologna, no more, no less.

Right in the middle of all this we find, as usual, our "friend" and his organization, the aromas of which are so familiar that I need not even name them.

The air line pilots have held the good ship "Air Transportation" steady for years, and they are not going to fail to steady the boat now and during the postwar period. Our job now is one of debunking, getting down to rock-bottom, and reflecting common-sense facts on past, current, and future aspects of the business so that as an over-sold public will not be taken over the bumps.

We speak of the dangers of inflation. Inflation and over-selling of the potentialities of postwar air transportation is just as dangerous and disastrous as inflation could be the financial structure of our country. Members of ALPA, numbering more than 3000, can do a wonderful job of debunking, and I think it is high time that we all got busy. We are all in constant contact with the cream of the American public, and we had better assume the job of keeping the public straight--especially the lawmakers-- on what the real future of this business is.

Air transportation, both domestic and foreign, will develop in accordance with the need that there is for air transportation, and we had better all realize this. President Patterson of the United Air
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