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10 years service or had flown half of the time since you were 27. Suppose the auto wreck we discussed before had been fatal. Would your family receive anything at all?"

This is a correct statement of fact but it is obviously not intended to help one to understand the situation. Probably most of the pilots would suppose that the last question would be answered "no". As a matter of fact, it would be answered "yes". Moreover, if you worked from the time you were 22 until you were 27 and then quit the air line, your insurance would run until you were 37 years old. You would not know from the quoted statement that if the pilot whose car was wrecked had quit at 33 and was fatally injured when he was 42, he would still have insurance under the ALPA plan; but that is the fact.

(10) In paragraph 14, after quoting from the "Blue Book", it is stated that "To this should be added 'and will cost you 7-3/4 times as much as social security'." The 7-3/4 times the Social Security contribution pays, of course, for both the old age and survivors' insurance. The point in the Blue Book on which this quotation was commenting has to do with the survivors' benefits. The average old age insurance benefit under the Social Security Act, plus wives' supplements, averaged as of April 1947, the last date for which data have been published, $29.11 a month.

During the first 10 years the ALPA plan operates (the old age insurance provisions of Social Security began to operate on January 1, 1940) the average pilot's annuity will be at least 7 times the Social Security 1948 figure. It is well to remember that under Social Security there are no disability benefits of any kind, and that the average age at which male Social Security Act beneficiaries begin to receive old age insurance payments has been over 69. The joke about all this is that when the ALPA bill is introduced in Congress, the insurance companies will be trotted forth by ATA and Co. to prove that the benefits can't possibly be paid for by a tax rate of 15 1/2 per cent.

(11) In paragraph 15 there is a comparison with a $67 a month pension payable under the ALPA plan with a alleged annuity of $152 per month which could be bought from a commercial insurance company for the same money. This is the same as saying that you've been gypped because I bought an 8-room house on a quarter-acre lot for $20,000, while for the same price you got only a 5-room house, but on 500 acres of bottom land with two barns and three tenant houses. The gyp consisted of the fact that you didn't get an 8-room house.

We do not think the kind of misstatements contained in the Stone circular is going to mislead the pilots into acting against their own best interests.

INTERIM RETIREMENT COMMITTEE

/s/ Clayton Stiles - Chairman
/s/ A. F. Foster
/s/ M. A. Gitt