BRASS TACKS

With our armed forces at one of the lowest ebbs of the war, this is probably the most unpopular time a post-war "planner" could pick to air his findings. But if anyone thinks that we will be able to take those problems in our stride when we come to them, he had better take a gander at what is going to happen to the so-called "industry of the future," when the smoke clears away.

According to Ernest R. Breech, who is Board Chairman of North American Aviation, Inc., we will need a standing airforce of about 24,000 military planes after the next armistice is signed,-and that means even if the U. S. takes an important role in policing the world. If you allow for a replacement demand of 6,000 planes a year, this will still only give employment to about 100,000 men- or less than 20 per cent of the number that will be working in aircraft production by 1944. That leaves a fat remainder of 400,000 or more workers (80 per cent of the entire industry), with small chance of finding jobs in aviation.

As for the possibilities of private plane expansion, it will take ten years before that industry gets up to 15 per cent of what the automobile industry was turning out before the war. The problem here is not getting the price down so much as it is overcoming innumerable difficulties dealing with weather limitations and working out new techniques of navigation and weather control. According to government acrobatics advisor Edward P. Warner, "It's going to be a long time before we can plan for 20,000 aerial commuters to drop down every morning, within forty-five minutes or so, on airports in the immediate neighborhood of Manhattan."

And commercial aviation, though it promises to become a great industry, is limited, strangely enough, "by the unparalleled efficiency of the airplane itself." The airplane can go 420,000 miles per year more than any other transport vehicle on land or sea,-which means you can get along with fewer of them. Warner figures that we can add 15,000 stops to the existing 40 (which would bring 90 per cent of the population within an hour's drive of an airport), and sink a million dollars into passenger planes to handle the commercial business with Europe, Asia, South America, and within the states. But even so, that would absorb only 5 per cent of the aircraft industry that will exist at the end of 1942.

This leaves freight hauling as the only remaining outlet, and as the airplane expands into that field, it will reduce employment in the railroad-equipment industry, ship building, and other customary fields of transportation.

The purpose of displaying all this data is not to divert any emphasis from war to post-war thinking. Some 400,000 aircraft workers will be thrown out of work, but it wouldn't matter if 4,000,000 packed the bread lines, so long as we win the war. The important point is that problems of unemployment relief and plant conversion are being met in the automobile industry today. We can take care of these 400,000 men, but only if we make plans now for speedily turning defense plants back into peace-time production, and tiding these workers over the period of conversion. If we know what the extent of those problems will be in aviation, we can improve on and apply current methods after the war. It is not the difference, but the realistic oneness of the problems that must be emphasized.