36 Is Gloomy and Angry Over

Now They're Just "A Backwater"

36 Is Gloomy and Angry Over Its Air Services

In the past six months there has been extraordinary com srcial building development in Lae, particularly in the section ice occupied by the old hospital, facing the Theatre Block in )urth Street, and extending back to the Catholic Church.

:S area can be seen in the hotograph, above —on the left ; shown some of the new build in Fourth Street: and on the , other buildings in course of .on in the street that runs at angles to Fourth Street. On ‘xtreme right is the Catholic ch. Until a few months ago the ; of this area was an empty Dck. other parts of the commercial in the last year, new banks other shops and business Ises have been built in one of iggest building splurges Morobe iver known. ; in February-March there ed another factor—the biggest breeze in Lae’s commercial •y, and townspeople were be tig to wonder if they had over and over-reached themselves, st of them don’t think so— lay the blame, rightly or ?ly, on Qantas Airways which, claim, overnight has changed rom being the centre of Terri air transportation, to a small end backwater—from an aerial of view, anyway—that just my service that happens to be >ver from what is considered ible for Port Moresby.

lonnies Are The Trouble

i whole trouble for Lae started Qantas put Super Contella on the Sydney-Port Moresby e in January, reduced the sncy of service and ran a

shuttle service between Port Moresby and Lae with DC4 (and sometimes DC3) aircraft. Previously the Sky masters ran all the way through from Sydney to Lae and the fre quency of the service was never less than five, and sometimes as much as seven per week. (See also p. 39).

Mr. A. J. Bretag, chairman of the

Lae Advisory Council, says that Lae is ignored and “worse off than it was years ago”. The shuttle service from Port Moresby to Lae, says Mr. Bretag, has not operated satis factorily since the Super Constella tions came on the service.

And this aspect of affairs has been placed before the Director of Civil Aviation, on whose report rests the decision whether another airline operator should get a licence to operate from Australia to the Terri tory.

Port Moresby may think that it is doing alright with its four Super Constellations per week plus the call of the Sydney-Hongkong Super Constellation once weekly.

But in Lae they don’t think bigger aircraft mean progress; they are solidly behind any move for a second operator on the Sydney-New Guinea service.

And they would like it right now.

Some P-NG people still travel the hard way. This is an in-flight photograph of the in terion of a DC3 which carried a capacity load of passengers (mostly returning schoolchildren) from Madang and Goroka to Port Moresby recently to link with the Super Constellation.