Aviation Is Weaned
AVIATION IS WEANED ON OR about December 31, the Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics will cease to exist, but no one interested in aviation is the least alarmed. For one thing...
...It is more likely that the importance of the Fund will be overestimated than underestimated...
...It is not so easy to take account of other contributions to the field, obscure and scattered, but without the aggregate effect of which the Guggenheim millions might as well have been dumped into the sea...
...Under the circumstances the departure of the Guggenheims will have its psychological advantage...
...On the other hand, it is interesting to speculate along what lines American aviation would have developed without the Guggenheims...
...but It is likely that we should have had only the beginnings of our passenger service...
...Given to a large university, it would have resulted in a group of dormitories, or a library, or a rather niggardly endowment for the professors...
...The experiments and researches which the Fund has been conducting will be carried on in the schools established for that purpose, which should now begin really to be of service...
...The effect will be to stimulate the air-mindedness which the Fund has made into one of our national slogans...
...The skeleton of an air-mail system had been laid down, but there was no passenger service to speak of in comparison to what was already available in Europe...
...AVIATION IS WEANED ON OR about December 31, the Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics will cease to exist, but no one interested in aviation is the least alarmed...
...It is a good thing, for instance, that the special flights which have always been able to receive help from the Fund should look toward the aviation industry for financing...
...The announcement does not come abruptly-it has been expected for a year, and aviation has had long enough in which to prepare to do without the Guggenheims...
...In few other causes could $4,000,000, distributed over a period of three and a half years, have gone so far, or meant so much...
...The industry itself needs no more coddling...
...But in 1925 and 1926 aviation in the United States sorely needed encouragement...
...To the cause of aviation in this country, $4,000,000 was the difference between embarrassment and riches...
...Having done its best to make the airplane "safe, popular and regularly available," the Fund goes out of existence, and its end is simply a dramatic announcement of the fact that civil aviation is now able to fend for itself...
...In its comparatively easy state today, $10,000,000 would not mean so much...
...For in any discussion of airways progress in the United States, the work of the Guggenheims is the obvious thing to start with...
...Possibly the air mail would be as active as it is today-this was inevitable...
...Then it has been understood from the first that the Fund should have only a temporary existence, intended simply to help American aviation off to the flying start it should properly have...
...schools already founded will receive further endowments, and there is more than a half-million dollars with which to do this...
...Passenger lines in Germany, France and England were maintaining regular schedules and doing a good business when passenger flying in the United States was still mostly a matter of sight-seeing excursions above the big cities...
...Perhaps the greatest achievement which can be credited to the Fund is that it has pointed the way for the development of an aerodynamically safe plane...
...The safety contests it sponsored are in direct contrast to the spectacular and stunting type of flying which has resulted in so many tragedies...
...The airplane might not be quite so safe as it is, and certainly we should not understand so well what needs to be done to make it safer...
...For one thing it leaves no unfinished business behind it: the South, which does not yet have a school of aeronautics, will have one...
...the lighter-than-air theorists, largely neglected so far, will get their own institute at Akron...
Vol. 11 • November 1929 • No. 2
