Aeronautics and such civilian organizations as the Aeronautical Chamber of Commerce, National Aeronautic Association, Society of Automotive Engineers, National Aircraft Underwriters Association, as well as the Aviation Committee of the American Bar Association, and the Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, have participated in our conferences. We believe that the bill will meet the needs adequately and constructively.

"The Act, in brief, provides for the establishment in the Department of Commerce of a Bureau of Civil Aeronautics. The Act is divided into five parts and establishes authority for the inspection and licensing of aircraft and pilots, establishing and certifying air routes and terminals, as well as rules of the air and their administration, and so co-operating with our Military, Naval, Postal and Commercial air activities that the whole can literally be co-ordinated into the Air Power of the United States. Aviation is, perhaps, the most significant mechanical development of this generation, contributing as it does to the speeding up of transportation and forming the key of our national defense on land and sea.

"In his inaugural message, President Harding urged legislation for the regulation, relief and encouragement of aviation. The establishment and development of Civil Aeronautics has the endorsement of the administration. The basis of Air Power must be a healthy, self-supporting aircraft industry. Among the needs of this industry are increased public confidence, increased capital and more favorable insurance rates. Public confidence will expand as the hazard of aviation diminishes. Capital undoubtedly will enter the field as soon as our basic law governing the operation of aircraft is established upon a sound and broad basis, and under responsible management and direction and reduced hazards, reasonable insurance rates will follow. It is confidently expected that the proposed Civil Aeronautics Act of 1923 will solve practically all of these problems."

WHAT WINSLOW BILL PROVIDES

H.R. 13715 provides for a Bureau of Civil Aeronautics in the Department of Commerce, to be administered (under the Secretary) by a Commissioner of Aeronautics. It proposes to regulate as an element of interstate commerce the operation of every civilian flying machine in the United States and possessions, all civilian flying and all air navigation facilities. The act, which is to take effect sixty days after it becomes a law, carried amendments to the navigation laws, to the Tariff, Public Health, Immigration, and the NarcoticDrug Acts, the Criminal Code, etc.

No flying machine may be operated until it has been registered

and certified by the Bureau as being airworthy. Provisions are made for admitting aircraft under foreign registry. All aircraft shall be marked so as to make identification an easy matter. All civilian air navigation facilities, airdromes, routes, etc., must have a certificate as to their suitability for the purposes intended.

No persons who have not qualified by examination will be certified to pilot aircraft. Only those possessing such a certificate from the Bureau will be permitted to operate or pilot aircraft. A logbook or detailed account of all operations must be kept. Fines and penalties are provided for violations. The Secretary of Commerce is authorized to designate and approve all public and commercial air routes, and to maintain them adequately whether they are owned by the Government, State or municipality. Maps shall be made available along with periodic reports giving in detail all information relating to civil aviation.

Government airdromes such as those operated by the Army, Navy and Air Mail Services are authorized to sell to civilian aircraft alighting there such equipment and supplies as may be necessary to aid them in continuing on their way to the nearest private or public field.

The President is authorized to prescribe reserved air spaces for public safety or national defense; and over these spaces civil aircraft may not fly without special authority. The measure literally makes all civil aircraft subject to regulations when engaged in interstate and foreign commerce.

The Bureau of Civil Aeronautics will have full administrative powers and may invoke the aid of the courts in carrying out investigations, penalties, etc. The Secretary of Commerce is empowered to appoint a "civil aircraft consulting board" composed of seven members representative of the manufacturing, designing, engineering and operating branches of the art, to act in an advisory capacity in the solution of all problems arising in American civil aviation develop

ment.

CONGRESS ADJOURNS; BILL DIES

The bill, as finally introduced on January 8, 1923, was referred back to Mr. Winslow's Committee and the Committee as a whole in turn referred it to a special Sub-Committee, composed of the following Congressmen: Samuel E. Winslow of Massachusetts, Chairman ex-officio; Everett Sanders of Indiana, Schuyler Merritt of Connecticut, Carl E. Mapes of Michigan, Homer Hoch of Kansas, George Huddleston of Alabama and Clarence F. Lea of California. The Special Sub-Committee did not see its way clear to hold hearings

and the 67th Congress came to an end, without having this important subject considered by the House.

Distressing as this failure was, further discouragement was caused by the energetic activity of the Conference of Commissioners. No sooner had the hopelessness of passing the Federal law during the Sixty-seventh Congress become apparent than the Conference caused to be introduced simultaneously in the legislatures of forty or more states a revised draft of their proposed uniform act.

This procedure, in view of the Conference's report and discussions at the Washington meeting, was widely deplored. The proposed state measure is objectionable because it is based upon the assumption of Federal licensing, etc., before (not after) a Federal law has been passed. It was, as one observer expressed it, like decorating a building before the foundation and roof are complete. This precipitate state legislation was promptly and vigorously opposed, and at the time of publication, North Dakota alone was reported to have passed it.

In spite of this situation -procrastination on the part of Congress and precipitancy on the part of the Conference of Commissionersthe civilian operation of aircraft in this country has continued. This fact alone is convincing evidence, not only of the inherent and persistent need and demand for aerial service, but also of the courage. and tenacity of American operators of aircraft. A survey of the Aeronautical Chamber of Commerce late in 1922 showed that forty nations of the world have some sort of air law, based in most instances on the International Convention for Aerial Navigation, while the United States has none.

CHAPTER VIII

AIRSHIP PROGRESS IN 1922; THE NAVY ZR-1; THE ZEPPELIN REPARATIONS SHIP ZR-3; THE GOODYEAR ARMY SEMIRIGID R-1; STEPS TOWARD COMMERCIAL OPERATIONS

N

O more conclusive evidence of the substantial nature of the claims of the airship can be conceived than the lighter-thanair progress made in 1922-a year marred in the beginning by the destruction in February of the "Roma," the army semi-rigid purchased from Italy. In 1921 the Navy suffered a bitter experience with another foreign-built ship, the ZR-2 which broke in the air and then took fire soon after its completion in England. Publicity established America's position as one of the leading nations in months of each other, was utterly depressing. Nevertheless, the Army, Navy and civilians carried on; and their activities were such as to warrant the assertion that the year 1922 may be said to have established America's position as one of the leading nations in lighter-than-air development.

All those interested in this phase of aeronautics were particularly concerned with the two rigids and one semi-rigid nearing completion in December, 1922, and scheduled for initial flights in 1923. One was the ZR-1, the Navy rigid, fabricated in this country and assembled by the Naval Bureau of Aeronautics at the Lakehurst, N. J. hangar. The other rigid was the Zeppelin ZR-3, a commercial type being built by the Luftschiffbau-Zeppelin at Friedrichshafen, Germany, and about to be flown to this country and turned over to the United States Government as a reparations ship. The semi-rigid was the R-1 designed for the Army and constructed by the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company at Akron, O. The ZR-1 was the first rigid to be built in America and the R-1 the first semi-rigid. With the ZR-3 reparations ship, they were to form a nucleus for the lighter-than-air division of the aerial fleets which must be developed as an integral part of the national defense and transport system.

THE ZR-I

The huge metal skeleton of the ZR-1 in six months had grown up from some four hundred thousand pieces of duralumin turned out at the Naval Aircraft Factory in Philadelphia, until on Jan.

I, 1923, it nearly filled half of the Lakehurst hangar, the only one on this hemisphere built to house two rigids of the size represented by the ZR-1.

One rarely sees such vast space roofed over and enclosed with glass and steel. A sixteen story skyscraper could be pushed under the doors and along the floor for 800 feet, or more than three average city blocks. Wireless stations, laboratories, repair shops, a hydrogen gas plant with a daily capacity of 75,000 cubic feet, quarters for a thousand officers and enlisted men as well as hundreds of civilian employees, these and other structures are clustered about the huge shed which dwarfs everything else, even the mooring mast set up a half mile or so from the hangar doors. In appearance the mast is a lesser copy of the Eiffel Tower. It is 165 feet high. Its base forms an equilateral triangle of structural steel, sixty feet on each side, and it tapers to a platform at the top. On the ground level are motor winches, gasoline and water pumps and elevator machinery. The motors work the elevators and operate the pumps and winches, which haul the airship to the mast and hold it in place by means of great cables. Fuel, water and gas are then taken aboard the ship from the platform above, as are the passengers, while the airship is moored there. Eventually all principal cities will have similar masts for airship anchorages, just as ships have piers.

Meanwhile the Army Air Service has another large shed at Belleville, Ill. It is 810 feet long, 150 feet wide and 150 feet high. The Naval Bureau of Aeronautics operates a single ship shed at Cape May, N. J. The major activity for 1923, however, centers about the Lakehurst shed, where the ZR-1 has taken form majestically in that huge space.

Nearly all the initial assembly work had been done from platforms let down from above. For the last six months in 1922 many of the 200 workmen employed on the construction had clung to ladders, let-downs and platforms inside and out of the metal latticed frame, silhouetted like ants against a window screen.

The ZR-1 was designed by Naval engineers basing their calculations on the plans of the Zeppelin L-49 which was captured by the French, who made plans and distributed them among the Allies. At the request of Rear Admiral W. A. Moffett, Chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics, a committee of experts from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics inspected and approved the plans. All available talent had been used in the construction of the frame work which was fabricated at the Naval Aircraft Factory in Philadelphia and taken to Lakehurst for final assembly. Structurally