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To All Active ALPA Members
-22-
January 26, 1948

All air line pilots who have commissions will soon be asked to consider taking steps to straighten out their military records and become active in Air Force reserve units. The air line pilots who don't held commissions may wish to become commissioned in some branch of the reserve Air Force. Air line transportation is really, to a large extent, an arm of the military forces and is supported largely on that basis by the government.

In any event, if war comes, the Department of Defense will draft or assign everyone in accordance with a master mobilization plan now being formulated. It's always better to get lined up ahead of time and avoid the mad scramble and confusion when war comes and the strong possibility of being caught in the walking Army or drafted into other branches of the service, which happened frequently in the last war and caused ALPA much trouble. There were a number of injustices. But they were held to a bare minimum in comparison to what they would have been without Association intervention.

Please look over the air reserve data questionnaire enclosed, fill it in, and send it to Headquarters to complete out military files. We will then be able to answer questions that are being asked us by the Department of Air Force, Headquarters, U. S. Air Force, relative to the military reserve status of the air line pilots.

11. THE PENSION PLAN.

ALPA's organizational structure (see pp. 28-29 of the By-Laws) includes a Pension Committee. The 9th Convention appointed First Pilots Clayton Stiles of UAL, A. F. Foster of TWA, and M. A. Gitt of Colonial as members of this Committee to examine into and reactivate the pension plans of the air line pilots, which had been lying dormant during the war. The Pension Committee was instructed to do everything necessary to sponsor expeditiously the enactment of legislation to secure a federally-controlled pension plan for the air line pilots, modelled along the same general lines as the pension legislation in effect for the railway workers. Considerable progress has been made and the air line pilots' pension bill is now just about ready to be introduced in Congress. The 9th Convention appropriated sufficient cash to carry on this work. To date, $13,699.87 has been spent to bring this bill to its present state of completion, which, needless to say, is no small task and no small sum. This cost figure doesn't include the cost of the extensive amount of work done on the pension project by Headquarters.

One of tho country's outstanding pension experts. Mr. Murray W. Latimer, whose picture and background appear in the January issue of THE AIR LINE PILOT, has been acting as ALPA's pension consultant since March 26, 1947.

Our first efforts on Capitol Hill ran into the usual mixture of optimism and pessimism. The pessimistic note was that it is the second session of a Congress and a presidential election year. Unexpected first-flash support for the measure from the conservative element offered the optimistic note.

We now have a pension bill except for the finishing touches, and that's a big part of the fight. The pilots' pension bill and the covering statistical arguments and supporting data will be complete before the end of February. A pension bill is lengthy, and complicated to formulate and draft. It takes months of effort.