Even though Congress had supposedly integrated the armed forces by the time the Finletter Commission convened, the interservice feud raged worse than ever. The Board was unable to draw from Defense Secretary Forrestal any concrete program for aircraft procurement; the Chiefs of Staff had not been able to agree on one. Thus died the first objective of the manufacturing industry’s air-power program.
However, when the Air Force took the stand before the Board, Stuart Symington, now its secretary, moved swiftly and decisively to the attack with a concrete recommendation for a “seventy group” air force. Out of his forceful presentation came ultimately appropriations by Congress which proved to be the salvation of the aircraft manufacturing industry. Congress, fully alive to the role of the aircraft industry in national security, was largely motivated by considerations of preservation of the establishment.
The air-transport people, shoved into the background by superior showmanship, made a sorry presentation. It had fine leadership in Adm. Jerry Land, its president, and in two vice-presidents, Bob Ramspeck and Milton Arnold. But its membership was torn by dissension over that time-worn conflict, the “chosen instrument.” President Juan Trippe, whose creation of the great Pan American Airways system is one of the shining examples of inspired leadership in private enterprise, favored the policy of a single overseas American-flag airline, as the only means of competing with foreign, government-owned, or subsidized air lines. Other operators strongly opposed this concept as constituting a monopoly, and favored the system of “reasonable regulation” as practiced with domestic airlines.
This fundamental issue, long bitterly fought behind the scenes, had previously burst into the open at Chicago during the first meeting of the International Civil Aviation Conference. The United States State Department, ably represented by Adolphe Berle, had fought hard for the “five freedoms,” a modern counterpart of the old doctrine of freedom of the seas. Against the powerful opposition of certain foreign governments, notably that of Great Britain, the United States, weakened by the inner controversy, had been forced to settle for three of its five freedoms. This same issue now confused the Air Transport Association’s presentation before the Finletter Board. On this rock, a second great objective of the inquiry, an investigation of the reasonableness of regulation, was scuttled.
After exhaustive inquiry, the Finletter Board recommended numerous improvements as to policy in its report “Survival in the Air Age.” The Congressional Aviation Policy Board, after waiting for this report, issued its findings on March 1, 1948, in a joint-committee print entitled “National Aviation Policy.” But with echoes of Hiroshima still ringing in the ears of the investigators, air force displaced air commerce in top billing. The Congressional Board held frankly that a strong, stable, and modern civil aviation component is essential to air power for national security and that domestic and foreign commerce of the United States should be promoted by whatever means appear most practical until it reaches such stature in passenger and cargo capacity as to constitute in a crisis an adequate logistical arm of the national defense establishment. In other words, air commerce exists to support the armed forces. We in the aircraft industry had naïvely insisted that it must be the other way around. With the Congressional Committee’s profound observation on the place of civil air transport in air power, and its denial of the first premise of the aircraft industry’s air-power policy, we lost our third great objective.
While appropriations for military aircraft served momentarily to preserve the manufacturing industry and keep the military establishment from further deterioration, funds were forthcoming only on a hand-to-mouth basis. So long as Stalin continued pressure on Europe, Congress would appropriate; the moment he eased up, Congress would revoke. The essential long-term continuing program so necessary to technological progress went by the board. Even Representative Carl Vinson, whose vision had built the Navy of World War II and whose leadership had implemented the aviation programs, seemed unable to formalize a program to put into effect this generally accepted principle. Adding up the results of five years’ effort, the Aircraft Industries Association had to admit failure to reach its goal. To me the reason was abundantly clear. We had failed to enlist the cooperation of the armed forces and airline transport operators under the basic precept of cooperation in public policy and competition in operations.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The Hand on the Stick
Early in 1949 the Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee of the Senate, under the chairmanship of Senator Edwin C. Johnson of Colorado, began inquiring into the ills of the airline transport industry. Senator Johnson had sat at my table at the dinner given by the aircraft manufacturers to Congressional leaders in aviation in Washington some five years earlier. A man well informed on the whole subject, he now began directing an inquiry that promised to initiate an important forward step in the formulation of American air policy. Unlike the Finletter Commission and the Congressional Aviation Policy Board, both of which had been held under the overcast produced by the cold front of fear incident to the Berlin crisis, the Johnson inquiry, following close on the brilliant success of the Berlin Airlift, focused attention solely on airline transport.
Curiously enough, the underlying significance of the Berlin Airlift was seldom touched upon in the flood of commentary that accompanied the lifting of the blockade. While it was generally recognized as a defeat for the Soviet, and served to ease the tensions and allay the fears of war, the epochal character of the operation went almost unrecognized. Paul Fisher, in the Bee Hive, house organ for United Aircraft Corporation, in a brilliant article written on the spot, hailed the victory of air freight. For the first time in world history, commercial air transports—not combat aircraft—had spearheaded United States foreign policy in a victorious action against the swashbuckling Soviet. The very forces which had once reduced Berlin to rubble with bombs had now saved the population from starvation with air cargo.
Meanwhile, rapid progress in the development of guided missiles had raised the question of the future of the airplane as a major weapon carrier. Some strictly military manufacturers had already begun giving serious consideration to the problem of whether to continue to specialize in aircraft or to shift over to the development of guided missiles. And once experimental aircraft had exceeded the speed of sound, some began to wonder if that velocity might not one day mark the division between combat aircraft and those designed for commercial purposes. In other words the Johnson Committee began its hearings against the background of a changing weather map.