Transpacific Air

Services

PAA Promise An Early Start

rERE are signs that steps are being taken to resume a Trans-Pacific mail and passenger air service be tween North America and the South Pacific; and already there are indications of keen competition between British and American air-lines.

The report was current in Sydney, in May, that Qantas, Ltd., the well-known Australian company, was about to send a survey plane from Sydney to Suva.

Evidently, this report reached Pan- American Airways, which pioneered the service between Hawaii and Auckland, and was operating regularly, Honolulu- Canton Island-Suva-Noumea-Auckland, when war caused the suspension of all civil flying at the end of 1941.

On June 3, the Sydney “Telegraph’s”

New York correspondent reported that PAA would resume the service on a weekly basis in June, and would run a twice-weekly service as soon as planes were available.

This was welcome news to Australians.

Air-mails from USA come regularly to Australia, but there is no return air-mail —Only slow surface mail —and for this Australians blame their blundering and inefficient Government. Passenger traffic between Australia and USA, and Pacific ports in between, is a matter of sheer ,luck and wild adventure; and apy air line which can get in quickly and remedy this state of affairs will be called blessed by the business community.

AT the end of last year, Mr. Fraser, Prime Minister of New Zealand, hinted that Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United Kingdom were contemplating a combined Padific service between Sydney and Canada. On his re cent visit to New Caledonia, Mr. A. W. G.

H. Grantham, Governor of Fiji and High Commissioner for the Western Pacific, also suggested something of the sort. In this service, no doubt, Qantas Airways (mentioned by our Noumea correspondent) would be interested.

Any such trans-Pacific service must necessarily have landing facilities in Hawaii, which is, of course, American territory. No indication that the US intends to grant landing rights in Hawaii to British Empire airways has been given. Maybe, they will be granted when PAA can land in Australia.

Pre-war, PAA had landing rights in Fiji and in Auckland, NZ. Presumably, those rights still hold good.

It was believed last year that PAA might be permitted to fly direct to Sydney when trans-Pacific civilian transport was resumed (pre-war domestic politics were responsible for withholding landing rights in Australia to the Americans); but there is no indication at the present moment of this happening.

IT will be remembered that the talks between Britain and America, which took place in America last year, with a view to ironing-out ait-transport and spheres-of-influence problems, concluded without any definite conclusions being reached. Apparently, the position is that the skyways are wide open for all-comers —provided they can .get the necessary staging facilities along the route they wish to travel.

In October, 1944, Captain P. G. Taylor, famous Australian airman, arrived in Sydney after a trans-Pacific survey flight by Catalina along a new route south of

the equator. Nothing further had been heard of this route, but it is unlikely that Captain Taylor’s survey was under taken just out of academic interest.