78 Miracles Ahead! 



the aviation industry to strike out and design a new and much 

 larger luxury air liner for domestic passenger service. He 

 envisions a four-engined, sixty-three-and-one-half-ton passen- 

 ger plane with a cruising speed of two hundred and sixty-six 

 miles per hour and a range of twenty-five hundred miles. Its 

 engines would probably produce three thousand horsepower 

 each. By day this de luxe plane would seat one hundred pas- 

 sengers and at night would have sleeping accommodations for 

 fifty-six. There would be a comfortable lounge for passengers. 



This engineer also predicts the development of another 

 four-engined forty-ton plane which would offer service com- 

 parable to that in "club" or better-class railway-coach travel 

 and would make more stops than the de luxe plane. Finally 

 Mr. Davies favors the construction of a twenty-one-ton, twin- 

 engined plane to serve as a "variable load carrier." It would 

 carry either passengers or cargo or both, and operate on 

 feeder lines running from small towns and cities to the main 

 routes of the air lines. A bulkhead would divide the passenger 

 and cargo space in this plane and could be adjusted accord- 

 ing to the number of passengers or cargo to be carried. 



Edward Warner, vice-chairman of the Civil Aeronautics 

 Board, agrees that passengers are likely to prefer one hundred- 

 passenger planes to those carrying only twenty-five. But he 

 warns that the larger planes will reduce the flexibility of the 

 air lines' service. He explains that four twenty-five-passenger 

 planes can give one hundred passengers nonstop service to 

 four different points, while one one hundred-passenger giant 

 can give nonstop service to only one point. 



Mr. Warner also contends that the length of nonstop flights 

 and the speed of air liners must be carefully considered if 

 air lines want to cut passenger fares to three cents a mile or 

 less. A six hundred-mile flight can be made at an operating 

 cost of twenty-two cents a ton-mile, whereas a two thousand- 

 mile flight costs thirty cents per ton-mile mainly because of 



