Trans-Pacific

Airways

Americans Moving: But British Still Dithering

THE Pan American Airways service between the United States and Auckland, via Hawaii, Canton Island, Fiji and Noumea, is expected to resume this month.

Final arrangements were completed by a team of experts who visited Fiji, New Zealand and Australia in January, in a large PAA plane.

Pan American Airways, however, are most anxious to extend this important Trans-Pacific service to Australia; and, if they think that permission to land in Australia is not far away, it is possible that the resumption of the service will be held up until the planes can go straight through to Brisbane and Sydney, from Noumea, instead of being diverted to Auckland.

Meanwhile, the dithering Governments of Australia and New Zealand have made little progress with their plans for a British Trans-Pacific air service. A “plan” has been under discussion for many months, first in Canberra and London, and then at the Anglo-American air conference in Bermuda.

MEANWHILE, two Australian airways companies have been trying to get official permission to start a Pacific service. For the past two or three months. Qantas, Ltd., have been running “survey” flights from Sydney to Suva, via Brisbane and Noumea, every two weeks—and the mail and passenger ser vices thus provided have been much ap preciated. But Qantas cannot get per mission to develop the service.

Late in January, Australian National Airways offered to start a service im mediately. with very modern planes, between San Francisco and Sydney, via Honolulu, Canton Island, Fiji and Auck land. This could only mean that, as a result of the Bermuda talks, Britain and America were granting reciprocal land ing-rights—on Hawaii and Fiji.

But the Australian Government —which openly hates all private enterprise, as expressed in the organisation of air transport concerns would give no answer to ANA.

Then it was announced (on February 5) that Britain, Australia and New Zealand had decided to make common cause in relation to the control of all British Trans-Pacific services; that they would take no major decision without fullest consultation between all three; and that they would confer in New Zealand in March, when the British Air Minister, Lord Winster, would be present.

This would appear to mean that the attempts of the British concerns to establish a Trans-Pacific service will be delayed for some time; and that, in the meantime, Pan American Airways will get going with the service terminating in Auckland. (PAA had permission, in 1940, to land in Fiji and Auckland —and that still holds.) This, in turn, will mean that the American line, getting in early, deservedly will scoop up the cream of the available traffic. It is bad luck for the Australian airlines. They have done everything possible to get started —but they have been defeated by official inertia, political stupidity—and worse.

Mr. Dave Rohrlach, of the Lutheran Mission, New Guinea, recently left Aus tralia by air for his mission station.