Paternalism Aloft

...There has been a tendency on the part of Bureau officers to license anything and everything legitimately under their control...

...When an airplane is built under the approved specifications for the Department, it is submitted to the government's aircraft inspectors who examine it, fly it, and test it in all conceivable ways, determining its speed, its safety factors, its wing loading, its power loading, and fixing its weight-carrying capacity...

...The field work of the Bureau of Aeronautics is all done through inspectors...

...The current objections and the likely protests of the future against this usurpation of authority will be noted at the conclusion of this article...

...If in the place of the NC there is merely an X, the message from the federal government to the people who may fly in it is that here is a plane which should fly, which it is willing to watch and criticize from the ground, and in which it expressly forbids persons to be carried for hire...

...The results are interesting...

...The principal building specifications for airplanes which the government will approve have been taken from the Army Air Corps requirements for military planes and are among the soundest of their kind...

...And more recently it has begun what seems a necessary work, that of controlling the methods of educating man in the mysteries of human flight...

...This orgy for licensing recently has led the government agency into a position where it is receiving some criticism from the flying fraternity...

...The idea of propounding a government handbook which would seek to declare definitely at this stage of human flight what is and what is not an airplane is certainly an example of something like this...

...Government licensing starts early in a flyer's career...

...For it is natural that a student having the pick of several aviation schools will select one upon which the government has placed its approval, and through the same line of reasoning, for obvious business reasons, the conductors of such schools will gladly seek a federal license and obtain one if it is humanly possible to do so...

...The same is true of the large-plane pilot who may suddenly be called upon to fly a small ship...

...The Bureau also had a plan for autocratically rating airports...

...It would be further reassuring to these persons if they could experience the tremor which shakes the Bureau of Aeronautics of the Department of Commerce when the absolutely rare accident of a plane losing its wings in flight does occur...

...The department dropped the plan...

...Both the nature and the limitations of this supervisory power, however, can perhaps best be set forth with the statement that in 1927 more than 60 percent of the aircraft accidents of the United States occurred in unlicensed planes...

...You may not be able to drive your automobile minus a license down Fifth Avenue or up Main Street without running afoul of the constabulary, but the Bureau of Aeronautics, without an air police or a police force of any kind, is hardly in a position to restrain you if, from a vacant lot in Iowa, you choose to risk your neck in a home-made skycraft or a standard plane to which renewal of license has been refused...

...Walton believes that it would be impossible to give a complete account of the ramifications of the jurisdiction which the United States has assumed over commercial aviation...

...He cannot begin to take instruction until he has obtained a student's license...

...It even regulates the amount of load which can be taken off the earth in an approved plane...

...It should prove reassuring to the novice air passenger and to all those who contemplate traveling by air "as soon as flying is safe" to learn that planes licensed NC (the international code signal for approved American aircraft) do not disintegrate in flight...

...The craft yaws and plunges, picks up and rushes on...

...The suggestion met with uniform opposition from the builders of aircraft, who advanced the rational objection, among others, that to certify a definite building code at the present time would be to check effectively all worthwhile experimentation...

...It is comparable to saying that a taxicab driver shall not drive a truck, and that your daughter who drives her sport car with skill and safety cannot drive the family limousine without special approval from the authorities...

...Two years ago the Department of Commerce attempted to recodify the commercial specifications into a new Aircraft Manufacturers' Handbook...

...A licensed flyer piloting an unlicensed plane likewise is subject to censure...

...it examines and licenses each and every person who can legally touch its controls in approved flight...

...Assisted by the Bureau of Standards and to a certain extent by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, it has raised certain definite structural qualifications for every airplane...

...It also exercises the additional power which comes through the possible combination of the different factors subject to license...

...All of this has been done under the power of the Air Commerce Act of the United States and through the Bureau's interpretation of that act...

...It has already been explained how flyers are licensed...

...When he has soloed and passed a preliminary test to the satisfaction of the airport inspector he is granted a private pilot's license, which does not entitle him to carry passengers for hire and which is of almost no value in commercial aviation...

...Here, then, is an example of a new and different kind of government control fostered by Mr...

...The X is awarded by the government to practical experimental aircraft designs with the expectation that it is merely a primary step to winning the more substantial mark of full approval...

...For the Bureau of Aeronautics can terminate an individual's flying career for a day or for a lifetime...

...THERE is a point in one of the first flights of each individual when, imagination having done its gory worst, the new air passenger is suffused with an uneasy ennui which appears to come from the contemplation of too many details conjured up as the possible fate of one so foolish as to fly...

...It appears almost impossible to give a complete picture with a single phrase, a single statement, or a book even, of the ramifications of the jurisdiction which the United States government has assumed in its regulation of commercial aviation...

...When the urfairness of this was pointed out, that proposal also was dropped...

...In many European countries, where wood frames are still used, this practice is frowned on...

...But if the plane bears prominently on its spread wings the markings NC before its license number, it may be said to accept the industrial fatigue of flight because the United States government says it can...

...Next he may work for a limited commercial license, while far ahead of him, at the end of 300 successful hours in the air, there is the final ticket to be won, a transport license...

...But as if this were not enough in the way of government tags, the Bureau has recently decided that the highest ticket shall be a limited ticket, and that a flyer who has been flying extensively in small single-engined sport planes shall not be permitted, without special examination and "dual time," to fly large tri-motored planes...

...But the government supervision does not stop there...

...At least indications of the possibility of such transgression have occurred...

...The enormous possibilities for error in the administration of such a ruling appealed at once to the Bureau officers and the proposal, with becoming blushes, was withdrawn...

...On every ranking airport of the country there is a Bureau representative, and through him the Bureau officials are able to follow the actual performance of the licensed plane, as well as regulate the entire sphere of aircraft activity...

...The wings are still there...

...And in some distant day when Everyman flies and then finds himself some fair Sunday grounded by the little-known bureau in Washington, we will hear a more forceful voice in the land against this power in Washington that controls every civil plane that moves in the skies above America...

...But in addition, it inspects every plane produced for air traffic, both public and private...

...It regulates the cargo, live and dead, which can be carried in different planes...

...Though there are many accidents, practically all of them happen to pilots of unlicensed planes...

...On the assumption that human flight is the most revolutionary accomplishment of the machine age, it seems fair to claim that almost unlimited supervision was justified in the case of a machine so dangerous to life and limb in the wrong hands or improperly operated...

...All that the government has been able to do in such cases is to show rather convincingly, with the aid of statistics, that if what you desire is safe flight you had better take one of the ten thousand or more planes marked NC...

...Needless to say, the flying fraternity are howling over this one...

...But it will be fair to assume that in that day as well as this, there will be a sincere appreciation of the enormous task accomplished by the Bureau of Aeronautics, which in its conception and organization represents one of the most vital innovations in President Hoover's former administration of the Department of Commerce...

...An unlicensed flyer in a licensed plane is an infraction of the law and places the plane's approval in jeopardy...

...It would appear to be mere understatement to say that in no single endeavor of the American people has the federal government taken so active a supervisory part as it has in the control of aviation...

...In the case of such an eventuality, all planes of that type throughout the United States would be immediately grounded pending government inquiry...

...If it passes these rigorous tests, it is given an NC license and the manufacturer is awarded an approved type certificate, which gives him a right to produce that particular design in quantity...

...Aviation schools are now "invited" to offer themselves for government inspection and the awarding of a rating...

...As a rule that expectation is fulfilled...

...In the matter of controlling instruction in flying, the Bureau itself was more cautious for obvious reasons...

...At that point, if the novice flyer is a speculative observer, his mind more than likely will focus in wonderment on the idea that cloth and wood and metal fabricated into a machine capable of flight holds together at all under the forces of constantly changing pressures as it moves through the air at a hundred miles or more an hour...

...A few years ago the Bureau, in its zeal to keep flying within the realm of reasonable safety, made a tentative suggestion that no licensed plane be allowed to land on anything except a licensed airport...

...And even this requires some additional qualification...

...The plane continues to fly...

...Its licensing of the planes has already been discussed...

...This representative of the government on the airport investigates all air accidents, makes reports, passes on the conduct of pilots, and when that conduct violates the Air Commerce Act, is authorized to recommend suitable punishment...

...First it is necessary to study briefly the manner in which the Bureau of Aeronautics has developed and exercised its control...

...It inspects and licenses the fields on and off which that plane will operate in normal use...

...The government's type certificate under which such a plane was manufactured in quantity would be revoked, and if final examination showed the design as aerodynamically unsound, the factory, the plant, the entire organization of that aircraft company could be disbanded...

...But because the Bureau officials have perhaps been more actively interested in aviation than in being Washington officials, they have for the most part been willing to correct their errors and withdraw from faulty steps when the reasons for such a course were placed before them by the men of the new industry...

...Here is but one aspect of the government's control over those invisible tracks in space above the United States which have been so picturesquely named "sky roads...

...A government agent is placed in the factory and follows closely every step in the building of subsequent copies of the approved design...

...The Aeronautics Bureau, however, has been both far-sighted and liberal...

...Hoover while Secretary of Commerce, the results of which the average citizen may examine for himself.-The Editors...

...In other fields its guardianship of man's aspirations to leave the surface of the earth and to travel with the birds is more closely and effectively fulfilled...

...After exhaustive tests it gave its approval to the use of welded steel tubing for the main structural frame of airplanes...

...It would be surprising if such an instrument for the control of a specific, a new and certainly interesting activity of the American people was not on occasion, through overzealousness, thrust beyond the line of reason or personal rights...

...not only when the plane is finished but in every step of its manufacture...

...This method accomplishes every purpose which could be gained by arbitrarily licensing or refusing to license air schools...