Current Topics in Brief
Page 35
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THE prospect that internal air lines I. will be licensed, which The Commercial Motor has referred to ever since 1933, is more imminent now that the Government has introduced its new Air Navigation Bill to the House of Commons. The Bill does not set out what the conditions of licensing shall be, and what the licensing authority must take into consideration.
There is a strong difference of opinion whether competition should be controlled, or whether the licensing conditions should be limited to safety and convenience, the enforcement of interconnecting time-tables and regularized fares. There is a feeling also that the Government, which is, in a sense, interested in air-line concerns which it has subsidized, should not be the licensing authority.
The route-mileage of our internal air lines has risen from about 200 in the summer of 1932 to 1,180 in 1933, 3,170 in 1934, and 6,500 in 1935. in a lecture in March, Sir Francis Shelmerdine, Director-General of Civil Aviation, said that by 1937 there should be an additional four medium, range, three long-range and 12 shortrange radio stations. This is evidence that the Government is determined to help on internal air lines to all-weather day-and-night regularity, Sir Philip Sassoon recently said that municipal aerodromes at the following nine places will probably be opened this year:— Bury St. Edmunds, ChelteuhamGloucester, Coventry, Oxford, Perth, Weston-super-Mare, Wolverhampton, Worcester and York.
The air-line map, last summer, was, to say the least, untidy and some think that we shall see a tendency towards radiating seivices from a geographical centre like Manchester or Liverpool, which will be a junction for air lines from places like Dublin, Belfast, Inverness, Newcastle, London, Portsmouth and Bristol.