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of all airplanes and, also, should approve the compression, torsional, and tensile strengths of all the metal, wood and plastic components and appurtenances which are parts of the structure of an airplane. Its stamp of approval should be given only after the most careful and grueling investigation and destruction testing under the direct supervision of the Bureau of Standards for Air Safety. This should apply also to every electrical part, to all radio instruments, to every electric motor, all switches, the wiring, the insulation, even to the fireproof characteristics of such things as upholstery, carpets, all forms of metal, plastic, and wood materials. The Bureau of Standards for Air Safety would produce, together with an independent Air Safety Board, real air safety in air line transportation. The Bureau of Standards for Air Safety approval should apply to escape hatches, fire detecting and prevention, and all other phases of air line aircraft fires. If this is done, the economics of the air line business will take care of itself. The air lines will gain and retain their full share of our country's transportation business. 

Gentlemen of this Commission, there is only one factor that can hold back this country's air line transportation development and the development of our air commerce generally throughout the world, and that is to fail to provide now the greatest possible degree of air safety. With the safety factors properly established and maintained, nothing can hold back air line transportation development. But, until we re-establish the independent Air Safety Board and establish the proposed Bureau of Standards for Air Safety, the completely vital factor known as the maximum degree of safety will be missing. Until we approach the problems on this level of realism, we will never really achieve air safety. If we face the problem boldly and with determination and re-establish the independent Air Safety Board and add the Bureau of Standards for Air Safety, the designer and builder of new aircraft will have available an ever-increasing wealth of proven safe material, appurtenances, devices, and instruments of every class or character from which to draw. He will not be guessing, and the lives of the public will not be the price of wrong-guessing. The designing of air line aircraft will be removed from the category of a guessing contest. It will be safeguarded and enhanced by proven materials, parts, and appurtenances that will have stood the acid test of non-political and non-dollar-influenced scrutiny and investigation. Our air line aircraft and all of their vital parts will have been service and destruction tested by the Bureau of Standards for Air Safety. 

WHAT CAUSED THE CONSTELLATION FIRES? ELECTRICAL WIRING, faulty appurtenances, upholstery that wasn't fireproof, hydraulic liquid that was inflammable; and we still have fire accidents for which there is not the slightest excuse in the year 1947. The words and most horrible accident in the history of air line transportation occurred even while this presentation was being written -- the UAL Douglas DC-6 Bryce Canyon fire crash, burning, it is believed, all to death while trapped thousands of feet aloft in the speeding plane. All