AVIATION development in the United States seems just now to have struck an air-pocket. Manufacturing plants which grew up almost overnight during the war and worked on a twenty-four-hour basis to supply machines and motors are, in the language of the airpilot, just "ticking over"-that is, they are in operation, but are not producing many planes. Twenty companies, with a combined capitalization of $10,000,000, are employing only thirty-five hundred men, all told. If unemployment were as bad, comparatively, in other industries, few workmen indeed would have jobs.

Why is there this lack of activity in America's newest and most fascinating industry?

America was the birthplace of the first heavier-than-air machine that lifted itself from the ground and flew under its own power. That was only eighteen years ago. Many students of the world's progress and invention claim the achievement of Orville and Wilbur Wright at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903, to be the greatest of the twentieth century, so far; and it may remain that when the twenty-first century arrives, seventy-nine years hence.

As everybody knows, the war gave aviation its great "lift." From 1914 to 1918, progress that in times of peace might have re

quired two decades was made in one fifth of that time. No money was spared in the development of new designs, and doubtless the aërial supremacy which the Allies gained in 1917 counted greatly in the victory of 1918.

But the fast war airplane, carrying only the pilot, or the pilot and an observer, was not adaptable to commercial flying. The landing speed required was too fast for ordinary' fields, the engines were too high-strung, and their construction was so complicated and fragile as to make their operation neither economical nor advisable.

The year following the armistice, manufacturers of aircraft were busy disbanding the huge mushroom organizations called into being by the war. During 1920 and the first months of this year, they have been building principally for the Government, and Uncle Sam has not been a lavish customer. Naturally, some commercial planes have been built, but not in large numbers. Aircraft engineers have not been idle, however. The designs which they have worked out and the plans they have laid, look years ahead. A demonstration of what American-built commercial aircraft can do was had at Curtiss Field, Long Island, on October sixteenth. From dawn till dark, forty airplanes were in the air continuously, competing in passenger

and freight-carrying tests, and every flight was successful. Our picture on page 145 shows the field, and also the extremes in sizes of planes one of seventy-seven feet wingspan, carrying thirty-four passengers, and an air runabout for one, the wings of which are fifteen feet wide. Similar tests were also carried out at the American Legion Convention in Kansas City and at the International Air Congress in Omaha.

The flying-machine itself had to be stabilized before it was a dependable passengercarrier, and the industry (the making and operating of machines) must have just such stabilizing influence in the form of aërial laws before it will become a legitimate commercial operation and not be regarded as a blue-sky adventure.

One of the chief underlying causes of the lack of aërial development in this country is the absence of governmental oversight. There should be some governmental agency to inspect aircraft, license operating companies and pilots of machines, and exercise a supervision in establishing airways and aerodromes.

There may be a question as to which comes first, airplanes or aërodromes; but certainly aerodromes and air-highways, properly mapped, are the necessary forerunners of air transportation on a reliable basis. Steamship companies would pass up New York as a port of call if there were no piers, docks, or harbor facilities provided at our chief city. Maintenance of harbors, coast-guard stations, and lighthouses are a national necessity, and their upkeep by the Government is considered part of its natural duties. The same attitude will presently be taken in regard to air facilities.

To be sure, twenty-one different departments and bureaus at Washington are concerned with flying in one way or another; but the twenty-second one is needed-the one which will deal with commercial aviation. There is such a bill now before Congress which, if passed, will add an air bureau to Mr. Hoover's Department of Commerce and provide for the regulation of aircraft in interstate and foreign commerce.

The army is Uncle Sam's chief pair of wings, and ninety per cent. of the aircraft in this country is controlled by the United States Army Air Service. Army fliers have been active this year not with long trips, such as they made to Alaska in 1920, but chiefly with bombing operations, sinking off the Virginia capes four types of German war

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forty thousand dollars apiece. The army has about seven hundred pilots, and their air-mileage during the year will amount to about six and a quarter million miles.

The United States Naval Air Service has also been busy with a long and successful cruise from San Diego to Panama and many service flights in the West Indies and the Canal Zone. The pilots of our seaplanes will turn in log-books at the end of the year which will show approximately two million miles of flying. The Navy has about three hundred pilots, and maintains flying-fields in the Canal Zone and Hawaii, as well as in the United States.

any other way, and the same is true of locating fish. The plane is manned by a pilot, radio operator, and fisheries expert. When a school of fish is seen, the news of it, with the location, is wirelessed back to shore, and the fishermen start off with a day of good luck guaranteed.

The United States Coast and Geodetic Survey finds the airplane useful in mapping, and correct maps are greatly needed, espe

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cially by aviators. Commander Reed, of NC-4 fame, reports that on his flight up the Mississippi River, while recruiting for the Naval Air Service, the maps he carried proved to be very inadequate. On one occasion he had difficulty in locating his position, and later found that a town which was marked on the map had been wiped out by a hurricane in 1893!

The army pilots who flew from New York to Alaska had to cover about half of the journey without the aid of a definitely mapped route. With only about one half of the world's 60,000,000 square miles properly laid out on paper, the future of the airplane in this field is as important as it is im

mense! And much of this mapping will lead to exploration. As a notable example of this use of aircraft, Sir Ernest Shackleton carried with him on the Quest, when he sailed for the south pole in September, a small plane equipped with sled-like landing skids, to be used for scouting a safe passage for his vessel in the antarctic. During this last summer the Fijians for the first time saw a flying-machine. A seaplane, sent to survey and map the coast of the principal island of this group, caused a great sensation among the natives.

Other government agencies to make use of the airplane are the coast guard, the Bureau of Mines, and the Bureau of Entomology.

The coast-guard station at Moorehead, North Carolina, was the first to employ seaplanes. Pilots have made rescues of persons from foundered vessels, when the surf was too rough for launching a life-saving boat from shore. Vessels in distress can also be better located by plane, and news of their position wirelessed both to shore and to other vessels which might come to their help.

In mine-rescue work, doctors and emergency equipment could be rushed by air faster than by train. But this use of airplane by the Bureau of Mines is overshadowed by another contribution which that department has made to the development of air navigation. The experiments in the production of helium, a gas which will not take fire as hydrogen does and yet is nearly as light and quite as suitable for the inflation of balloons and dirigibles, have been carried out by the Bureau of Mines. When the investigations were begun, in 1917, there were only about one hundred cubic feet of helium gas isolated in the world, and it was worth seventeen hundred dollars a cubic foot. By the time the armistice was signed we were developing large quantities of the gas and had it ready for shipment to France. The price had been reduced to ten cents a cubic foot. Helium is produced, in quantity, only in America, so in this gas we may have the key to our future mastery of the air.

One of the striking photographs accompanying this article shows an airplane spraying a grove of five thousand catalpa-trees which were infested with caterpillars. A special device, holding fifty pounds of arsenate of lead, was attached to the airplane; and while flying to the windward of the grove, this was released and sifted, the fine particles of lead "snowing" the trees and destroying the pest. Bureau of Entomol