Freighters of the Future

by ROBERT GROSS and WILLIAM WISTER HAINES

1

ANY plane can carry some kinds of cargo some distance at a profit, sometimes. The development of American commercial air freight has been a decade’s struggle between that evident fact and its inexorable corollary: self-supporting air freight requires a plane conceived, designed, and built as a freighter.

The paradox that we already have a vigorous commercial air freight, expanding in every dimension of tons, dollars, and miles, despite the imperfection of its tools, derives from the artificial incubation of the war.

The first scheduled all-freight cargo liner took off in 1943. Like its sisters, then bulging with military cargo, that converted passenger plane was far from perfect for its purpose. So were the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria.

War had demonstrated what wings would lift. To the jungle, the arctic, and the five continents had flown very nearly whatever was wanted — incredible amounts, shapes, and items of it in planes that were not built to carry freight. They had to carry it. The GI who saw cases of soft drinks as well as bulldozers trundled down the ramps of ATC might well have said with Lincoln Steffens: “I have seen the future and it works.”

It did work — miracles of physical accomplishment. The fiscal reckoning, like the planes, terminals, and cargoes themselves, was governmental. The taxpayer footed the bill.

Yet so alluring was that preview of possibility that since the war eighty-six companies, mostly composed of former GIs, have entered the air freight business. Four of them survive. There were many factors in these failures. The primary one was the unsuitability of available planes for commercial cargo carrying.

Only now, ten years after the first converted passenger liner stripped out its seats, is the true freight plane progressing from mock-up to manufacture. Had this plane been available to the vision and energy of the eighty-six pioneers, their incidence of failure would have been very different. It took their experience and failures to shape this plane.

The air freight problem is only in part an adjustment of plane, terminal, and cargo. The most significant factor in air freight, as in everything to do with aviation, can be called political; it is man’s ineradicable preoccupation with weapons.

The wing is a weapon. Realization that a nation with inferior wings might cease to be a nation put the American government, like all others, into aviation. Air power needs deep roots to defend its secondary right to make the wing a tool.

Since the magnitude of the need exceeded the scope of private capital, public interest had to underwrite some of the risk. Subsidy by air mail contract for the development of privately owned passenger lines was an expedient that fitted the capabilities of the early planes. It gave the taxpayer some immediate return on the industry he needed. It nourished aviation’s growth toward self-support.

In pursuit of this concept Congress authorized the Civil Aeronautics Board to grant franchises (and air mail contracts) to private companies which could show that their projected operations between designated terminals were, in the words of the act, “in the public necessity and convenience.” Those words were a restraint against suicidal competition on foreseeably lucrative routes. They were also an invitation to private brains, energy, and capital; to free enterprise; in a word, to profit.

The limitations of the planes of the time pointed these arrangements toward mail and passenger traffic. Both franchises and subsidies were revocable. The subsidies would terminate after satisfactory development of passenger revenue. They looked to the day when passengers would carry the mail instead of riding on it. But that day had to wait for better planes.

Even then perspective outlined a secondary objective of incalculable proportions. Long experience had shown the world of surface transportation, as air calls the wheel and keel carriers, that passenger revenue is only about one fifth of the total, or one quarter of the returns for hauling freight.

Now if passengers could be expected ultimately to carry the air lines, as upon sober projection they were, the question was not so much what air freight would carry as what it would not.

So it looked to the founders of the eighty-six companies. They had already seen wings lift almost every imaginable article of man’s making. They had learned their trade in wartime air transport. Could monetary accounting be worse than reckoning in blood? No one knew better than they that the perfect, even the appropriate, plane for freight was not at hand. Who ever began anything with a perfect tool? They would try it.

To report that eighty-two of them failed is to report only one side of the experiment. The other side is that, largely by their efforts, our national air freight has skyrocketed from an annual lift of roughly 40 million ton-miles in 1946 to roughly 250 million in 1952.

Of these totals the passenger lines carried a proportion that increased as the independent freighters dropped out. They will play a prodigious part in the expansion that is expected to reach a billion ton-miles for 1959. Other projections set that same year as the one in which freight, measured in both weight and dollar revenue, will overtake passenger traffic.

2

THE war which incubated air freight also retarded its adjustment to the commercial problems of peacetime. War stripped our air lines of their passenger planes when demand was soaring. V-J Day found aircraft manufacture facing an unprecedented backlog of orders for replacement, expansion, and improvement of passenger equipment.

In addition to their moral claims, the old customers were solvent. Many had already cut the umbilical cord of subsidy. New planes would enable others to do so. Government guarantee still remained available to need. The manufacturer, pondering his duty to stockholders, employees, old customers, and country, knew that subsidy as well as solvency underwrote passenger plane orders.

In the field of the freighter the gargantuan subsidy of the war itself worked oppositely. The aviation boneyards were cluttered with war surplus planes. Economical or not, they would skim the cream off potential air cargo. The prices at which these planes were resold to the multiplying freight carriers constituted an indirect subsidy which acted against the manufacture of true freighters.

Again, every obsolescent passenger liner was, after replacement, a potential freighter. The established air lines were expanding into freight. Almost every air frame then in service was good for a second tour of duty with cargo.

On the manufacturer’s own drawing boards were new planes which would carry not only mail and passengers but supplemental freight as well. This would be queen cargo, compact, limited, valuable, which takes its name from the great ocean liners. Its volume should not delay a rapid turnaround for passenger duty, but it makes a lucrative addition to regular runs. Every pound that rode with passengers would be lost to the freighters.

Finally the manufacturer, like other people, could see clouds in the future. He might have been excused for failing to discern in them the exact outlines of the Berlin embargo and Korean war. He would never have been excused for forgetting that the wing is a weapon, even though his government seemed to have forgotten.

The cut in government appropriations after World War II left the plane manufacturer almost alone to confront the staggering costs of new plane development. Especially in freighters, his failing prospective customers could not even share in the cost of a thorough study of their needs. Logic might insist that the government would also need a true freighter for military cargo. At the time, appropriations were inadequate to the grim race for improved combat types.

Against this background the plane manufacturer began, at his own expense, the study of commercial air freight. For he, too, remembered the four to one ratio of freight and passengers in other transportation. If subsidy would not lead to that, innovation must. Cargo would have to lift commercial freight as truly as the plane lifted cargo.

Queen cargo would never do it. Orchids—indeed all flowers—are ideal air freight. Their weight-value ratio, their perishability, the climate factor that puts optimum production so far from metropolitan demand — these are prime characteristics. The plane carries flowers at a profit. The question was what kind of plane flowers would carry.

Some items of air cargo are economical for all concerned at a dollar a ton-mile. But the eighty-two companies were failing in the 20 to 10 cents per tonmile bracket. Savage rate wars did swell the casualty list; the real problem was volume to bear irreducible fixed costs.

The rate-volume ratio in air freight is not a flight of steps. It is a pyramid of steps; every descent broadens the base. Cargo that cannot pay, say, 16 cents per ton-mile will literally leap into the air at 15 cents.

Measuring this pyramid by experience, analogy, and projection, surveying that ever-broadening base against his own long struggles with gravity and inertia, the plane manufacturer finally pronounced his dictum. His studies placed the highest possible base for a self-supporting air freight industry at about 4 cents a ton-mile.

To many an operator these words seemed the requiem of the air freight dream. They appeared to ignore the rising totals of tonnage then traveling between 20 and 10 cents.

The more thoughtful knew better. The 20 to 10 rates were already bankrupting most freighters. And they had been able to offer them only in war surplus planes, irreplaceable at the prices which put them into freight. Very few had ever touched the 9-cent level, even under optimum conditions. No converted passenger plane could ever get down to 4-cent operation.

True it all was, but still not final. For, accepting his own logic, and still at his own expense, the manufacturer had extended his study to outline the totally new plane that would carry 4-cent cargo — the first true freighter.

The differences between the revolutionary fourcenter and even the most efficient of previous conversions make a large library of blueprints. The luxury liner’s solicitude for leg room was out. The four-center’s pay load would be sol id bulk. This meant a stronger floor to support it, a new frame to support the floor, new power to lift it all.

It is propeller clearance that keeps luxury liner doors up so many steps. But those steps so dear to photogenic actresses and ambassadors make hoisting charges for freight. Up went wings and engines above the air frame and down came side doors to truck bed level. Still the four-center must be able to swallow a loaded truck. Ingenious ventral doors permit it to drive straight in.

Even plumbing had to be reconsidered. Livestock of all kinds was already an important item of 10to 20-cent air freight. The four-center had to be prepared for floods Noah never mentioned.

Gross weight, net lift, speed, altitude, range, takeoff and landing runs, length and strength of runways — these and the other variables of aerodynamics all had to be refitted to the new constant of 4-cent cargo.

Speed is the primary attraction of air freight, but in aerodynamics as in economics you do not get something for nothing. You buy speed not only with fuel but with frame limitation.

Is the .shaving of a few hours for fresh sea food more valuable than space for air-minded furniture? Would fruit and vegetables freeze in the stratospheric speedways that are ideal for the distribution of new dress styles? Altitude and range are functions of speed as well as of space. Would the plane that trades Texas produce for Chicago mail orders deliver mining machinery over the Andes or drilling bits to Abadan?

One by one the variables had been fitted to the invisible framework of the 4 cents on every blueprint. One by one they took their places in another equation which, in effect, said finally that 4 cents equal 40 million dollars. That would be the cost of the prototype. Line production at the rate of fifty planes a year might hope for a delivery price between l½ and 2 million dollars apiece.

This was very long arithmetic for an industry short of everything but guts. The impasse was broken by an older need than commercial air freight. The wing was still a weapon and modern war had brought the closest fusion yet between weapon and tool. The urgencies which originated military air transport had finally demonstrated the limitations of the converted planes that began it. In uniform as in mufti, the cargo problem had outgrown hand-me-downs.

When the services requested competitive bids for the best conceivable air transport, three manufacturers submitted plans. With the selection of the winner the 4-cent freighter was assured.

The first batch of them will go to the armed forces. Security still shrouds most of the specifications. It has been announced, however, that the 132-foot wing span will lift a 95-foot frame which has a cargo hold at least as large as the ordinary railroad boxcar. It accommodates a loaded 5000gallon gasoline truck and tractor. The normal crew of pilot, copilot, and engineer may be supplemented by a navigator on such flights as require one.

Government priority makes the date of commercial availability for these planes uncertain. Their ultimate future is not. In every detail of its configuration the 4-cent plane is the tool our air freight has needed.

3

THE farthest flights of engineering fancy, like the air frames that enclose them, must come to ground in terminals. Too many of our existing airports are already inadequate. They reflect a complacent approval of the divine wisdom which gave the passenger two legs. Freight will not walk.

The 4-cent plane is designed to exploit minimal runways. It can operate on unpaved strips for either war or commerce. In peaceful use, however, the plane itself is going to generate an avalanche of new cargo. Haphazard sheds, squeezed into the congestion of present passenger facilities and served by afterthought highways, will not only fail to meet this new traffic: they will lose it to better provision.

Integral in the manufacturer’s study of the 4cent plane are plans for its terminal needs. Some can be answered within existing airports. Some will require new ones. All terminals must have facilities now available in very few. Blueprints as well asadvice for the necessary roads, docks, refrigerators, warehouses, rolling bridges, conveyors, and servicing shops are waiting.

But help though he can and will, the terminal problem lies beyond the manufacturer, beyond the individual shipper and carrier. In the third chapter of The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith wrote a hundred and seventy-odd years ago: —

As by means of water carriage a more extensive market is opened to every sort of industry than what land carriage alone can afford it, so it is upon the sea coast and along the banks of navigable rivers that industry of every kind naturally begins to subdivide and improve itself; and it is frequently not until a long time after that those improvements extend themselves to the inland parts of the country.

The freight terminals in the airports of both present and future will profoundly influence the impact, of 4-cent air freight upon our industrial geography. Better terminals might have meant survival for some carriers who perished in the 20to 10-cent bracket. The 4-cent plane will reverse the situation. Goods, service, and labor are going to shift to it.

“We cannot sell goods in transit” is the merchant’s explanation of much of our present air freight. To him as to all users, the freighter has already begun to say, “Planes on the ground do not earn.” The expeditious ground handling of air freight is a mutual need.

In the long run, cargo, through appropriate charges, will pay for adequate terminals. This does not build them now. The community, region, and industry which wait to see it pay should ask themselves not only when but where it is going to pay.

America is dotted with onec-proud cities decaying on the shores adequate to nineteenth-century transportation. Many a village withers a few miles from the steel rails it misjudged. Los Angeles and Houston, on the other hand, reached imperiously for harbors. Denver built the Moffat Tunnel.

Past terminal problems have been chiefly municipal. The early freighters have had to stick to existing runways. The compasses of the 4-cent plane, however, are set to cargo itself—mercantile, industrial, and agricultural. The 4-cent terminal must be regional.

Helicopters have already proved their practicability as feeders for mail and military freight. Parachuting of commercial freight is as possible as parachuting military supplies. In commercial practice the pulling of the rip cord creates that economic anomaly, an empty plane. But if the plane is near the end of an economic run, near a terminal waiting with profitable reload, the parachute may revolutionize both distribution costs and industrial realestate values.

The ideal bureaucracy in the perfectly planned state would, of course, have produced the perfect freighter and its terminals simultaneously for an earmarked, noncompetitive cargo expertly handled by slaves. The freedom we cherish is more exacting. As long as our politicians respond to our needs instead of determining them, we must look first for improvement to ourselves. The choice of whether their stores, farms, or factories shall be six days or six hours from their needs is passing to the taxpayers.

4

FOR the wing as a weapon, air cargo was whatever had to be moved. Many a paratrooper will assert that a human being can be freight before he is boxed. He was — and so, in unimaginable profusion, were his needs. Yet one of our enemies surpassed even the diversity of our war cargo.

The late Field Marshal Rommel used air transport for several Junker 52 loads of Fräuleins to assuage the loneliness of his Afrika Korps. History denies us a waybill for that shipment and the term “baggage” does come to mind, but technically the girls were cargo, too.

For the wing as a tool, cargo is what is economic. An engine part worth 40 dollars in New York undergoes an economic metamorphosis when a break in its counterpart stalls a steamship worth 4500 dollars a day in Bombay. A box of windshield wipers in Detroit may be worth far more than their weight in gold to a Los Angeles auto assembler whose lines and storage yard are clogged for want of them. On the line those wipers are applied for a few cents apiece. Follow-up attachment by embarrassed dealers may cost several dollars.

These needs arise from emergency. So, beginning with war itself, does almost all air freight. But wars end. Commercial freight, first airborne in emergency, usually proceeds, through what might be called “emergenesis,” into practice. Having learned the succoring power of wings, that ship in Bombay can chart a more profitable return route, still within their reach. The auto assembler can start his lines on smaller reserves, or even without some items, now only hours away in Detroit.

Emergencies teach, but only if someone is around to learn. It was the eighty-six companies which took the hard lessons through emergenesis. It was their desperation to find cargo for empty planes and inexorable gasoline cost which disclosed live broadening base of the rate-volume pyramid. Their struggle demonstrated something far more significant than the firm foundations of the 4-cent level.

The American President who told his countrymen, “Our industrial plant is built,” lived to see its greatest expansion. He was, however, only articulating the widespread fallacy which considers that wealth is finite — the labors of man effect only its division.

The air freighter, like the farmer who plants or the mechanic who shapes, knows better. He knows that wealth is an infinite limited only by human application.

Outside San Antonio, before 1946, an okra grower supplied his accessible market with three acres of planting. Perishability limited him to neighborhood demand. Today he plants fifty acres; Wednesday’s picking is Thursday’s dinner in Detroit and Cleveland.

Those forty-seven acres of okra are new wealth in the world, created by an air freighter’s need, and availability, for return loads east from San Antonio. Not only could surface transportation never have created that new business. It now hauls the farmer fertilizer he formerly did not need.

The integration of eastern manufacture with western flowers, fruits, and vegetables is only one facet of the new potential.

Few perishables are more sensitive than style itself. Today a San Francisco merchant can place advertising for day after tomorrow’s sale of dresses that are still in New York. They will be on his racks when the store opens. Thanks to the containers developed by air freighters, they will not require pressing before sale.

Much conventional boxing and crating is obviated in air freight. The savings often exceed the difference between air tariff and the Less Than Carload Lot classification which is unprofitable to most surface transportation. For a detailed answer to the question “What is air cargo?” the reader might thumb the catalogues of the large mail-order houses. Even at the 20to 10-cent rate, they now use air freight extensively. A categorical answer is simpler; air cargo is new wealth.

Consideration of the wing as a tool which creates new wealth through air freight has so far been materialistic. Profit built and expands the economy in which we live. An American President once said that men do not make law, they discover it. One basic law of profit has been discovered; it must be mutual. Wooden nutmegs made a short profit and a long legend. The true ones still expand their markets, nowadays by air freight.

Men learned that law slowly, but at each step the discovery revealed a deeper truth. Enduring profit must be more than mutual; it must be community-wide in benefit. Today the world is looked in struggle on this subject. Those who believe that free men under maximum liberty will, in the long run, behave to each other’s profit are defending this faith. The opposing forces proclaim that every profit is someone’s ruin: ergo, profit produces slavery. In this faith they have embraced slavery to destroy their neighbors’ experiments with profit.

These irreconcilable ideas are the root of the current contention. They evoke an ominous recollection of the law Gresham applied to currency: when the good and bad circulate concurrently, the bad drives the good out of circulation. If we are not to be driven out of this struggle, if we are to sustain our freedom, it will take every resource we have. Indeed the cost of sustaining it, even on a limited conflict basis, will take better resources than we have yet had.

Air freight is a potent resource. It has been the effort of this paper to consider the wing as a tool. But modern war, hot or cold, makes all tools weapons, as it makes all workers warriors. Should the cold war ignite, holocaust will fly.

Though it has been frantically amended after every embarrassing collision with fact, Marxian doctrine retains shape enough to cast long shadows. One page pronounces final war with capitalism inevitable. Another exults that active war will be unnecessary: the free states will fall ol their own accord from top-heavy armaments and recurrent depressions.

Now the world would never have paid any attention to Marx if there had not been elements of truth in his malignance. Depressions have been phenomena of recurrent calamity to free economies. They will not be cured by denial.

Our most recent depressions have occurred amidst material plenty. Evidence mounts that the dislocation between high productive and unstable consuming capacity lies in our distributive facilities.

These are not wholly physical. Our credit and fiscal systems also have failed to bridge intermittent gaps between the producer’s surplus and the consumer’s need. It is impossible to doubt that better integrated air transport will narrow these gaps. The 20to 10-cent freight has already helped gear production and inventories to demand. This is profit for the whole community.

Before World War I there was a saying that every German worker carried a soldier on his back. The forty years since have increased the weight of weapons on every worker in the world. It may be beyond present wisdom to change this, but only today’s effort brings tomorrow ‘s wisdom.

Our forebears crawled. It is probable that man first stood erect to free his arms for the handling of weapons. But, having risen, he gained both stature and vision. He learned that, given a chance, the weapon can be a tool.

Reform, like charity, should begin at home. Fresher strawberries and styles, lower costs and inventories, higher wages and dividends are worthy objectives. Only through them can we find and face the full challenge: what shall air freight carry?

Commercial aviation began with a necessary load of subsidy upon the shoulders of every taxpayer. Air freight can be made to carry that load. The wings that do it will be lifting both the strength and the prestige of free enterprise, to the profit of the free world.

By doing that we should find the vision to make air freight, through mutually profitable distribution of the resources over which men fight, carry its ultimate load of peace.