XI

THE PRESENT USELESSNESS AND DANGER OF AEROPLANES.

A PROBLEM IN ORGANIZATION

In this world of great and irregular change, in this Western

civilization which is gradually becoming world-wide, men and women are

living longer, more healthily, and more abundantly than they have ever

done before. But in many respects they seem to be living much less

abundantly than they could do. One of the most remarkable facts in our

present astonishing spectacle of life is the now quite considerable

accumulation of life-enlarging inventions that, so far as the

generality goes, are being put to no use at all or to extremely limited

and unsatisfactory uses.

These things wait. Or, like the excessive birthday presents of a

spoilt child, some are partially unpacked and put aside for future

consideration. And some have been broken. Science and invention have

given these things to that spoilt child, the ordinary man of to-day. He

has still to learn the full benefit of them.

The most striking of these ill-appreciated gifts is flying. For the

last ten years at least safe, swift, delightful air travel round about

this entrancingly bright and various planet of ours has been available

for mankind at considerably less than the cost of ordinary first-class

rail or steamship travel. When I write “available for mankind,” I do

not mean that it is available for the reader or myself. I mean that

if mankind had been able to take it up, it would have been available

for us and all other individuals willing to pay the charges, charges

so low that almost any well-paid worker would have had a reasonable

use of this means of transport at his command. And when I say safe,

I mean safer than ordinary travel by rail or ship; and by swift I

mean travelling at something like a hundred miles an hour, and by

delightful--smooth, beautiful, and in the sweetest air. I have flown

fairly often. I know what I am writing about, I know the happiness

and wonder of flying, and I know that its present rarity, danger, and

unattractiveness are not due to any defects in the aeroplane or airship

itself--physical science and mechanical invention have failed at no

point in the matter--but mainly, almost entirely, to the financial,

administrative, and political difficulties of aviation.

The business and administrative side is not up to the mechanical side;

it is so plainly and unenterprisingly behind that I, for example, am

beginning to despair altogether of my once confident hope of flying

very agreeably round the world before I die. I have a nostalgia for the

coloured gorges of South Algeria, for the Great Wall of China, for the

scorched jungles of India, and the palaces of Ambar, and if I had my

rights as a civilized man I should be able to fly down over them all in

a handful of days. Never shall I set eyes on them.

I have flown fairly often but I fly no longer. I find it too

uncomfortable, irregular, and stupidly dangerous. In the old days

flying was a novel experience; one flew for the fun of the thing, and

there was no objection whatever to an element of danger in the affair.

In the experimental days one had no more right to complain of danger in

an aeroplane than in big-game hunting. And it was fair to make one wait

for a favourable day and a good machine. But those sporting days are

past. It is one thing to get killed in a hopeful and daring experiment

on the edge of things known, and quite another to be drowned or smashed

or roasted to death on an omnibus route because a certain number of

able but restricted gentlemen in control of the business have--with all

sorts of excellent excuses for doing so--sent one off in an overworked,

perfunctorily inspected, or overloaded machine. I have seen enough of

European flying services not to wish to see any more of them until the

whole thing is under “entirely new management.”

Nearly every one of the series of horrible accidents that have so

powerfully retarded the expansion of European passenger air travel

was a foretellable disaster. Sooner or later these tragedies were

inevitable under current conditions. I have crossed the Channel at

about two thousand feet with both engines popping away dismally, and

got to Lympne by a miracle, and the only thing that astonished me when

at last one of these things flopped into the water was that no one was

drowned. Hardly more than half of the passenger flights I have made

got through according to schedule, and I suppose I have spent almost

as many hours at LeBourget and Lympne and Amsterdam and Prague--and

Heaven knows which is the least attractive promenade!--waiting about

for machines that did not turn up or could not be put right, as I have

in the air. I do not complain of delays due to bad weather. What has

most wasted my time and endangered my life, in my attempts to be an

up-to-date traveller, has been that there were not enough machines and

pilots to run the service properly and safely.

Never in any case of forced landing have I known a fresh machine appear

to take on the passengers--only last month I saw that twelve dismal

passengers were landed in the wilderness of Puckeridge, in Kent, to

get to London by train at God knows what hour of the evening--and only

at Prague have I ever observed a number of reserve machines having a

reasonable rest and overhaul.

Now I am not reflecting here on the personal capacity and honesty of

any of the people concerned with the European air services. I live

quite outside the feuds and competitions, ambitions and disappointments

of that queer world. Whenever I state such facts as these, plain and

simple and easily verifiable, about the European air services, the

air press becomes extremely heated and defensively rude about it--but

the facts remain facts. For ten years Europe has been pottering,

dangerously and ineffectively, with this glorious possibility of air

transport about the globe, and it seems no nearer to its realization

to-day than it was in 1919. And the reason for this, I submit, is

because the old world cannot produce a financial and administrative

organization of a sufficient largeness, power, and scope to handle the

thing effectively.

It needs only common knowledge and a few grains of common sense to

realize that the exploitation of the air, as a means of safe, happy,

and generally available travel, is hopeless without the expenditure

of capital on the scale of, say, fifteen million pounds, plus secure

wayleaves over Europe and most of Asia and Africa. On that scale it

would be the most obviously easy and profitable of undertakings.

On that scale a number of main routes could be prepared and lit

between all the chief cities from Dublin, Lisbon, and Stockholm to

Vladivostok and Capetown, and a sufficient supply of machines and

a sufficiently big organization could be developed to ensure that,

except during very unfavourable phases of the weather, a machine, a

pilot, and an assistant in perfect condition would be ready to start

as passengers accumulated during certain hours of departure specified

for each aerodrome, with still plentiful machines in reserve. Then the

travelling public would know what to expect.

One could put together one’s valise in the morning in London, and dine

and hear some music in Munich, spend a second pleasant evening in the

Crimea after a day above the Danube, and so over the Taurus to Bagdad,

and into the sunshine of India by the fourth or fifth evening. Once

people were sure of the services they would begin to flow steadily

along the established routes. Their numbers and the seasons of their

coming would become more and more calculable; with that the fares would

fall and the passengers multiply. Air services can be far more elastic

things than train services. It is a most intricate thing to rearrange

trans-continental expresses, but an air service can turn over its

machines from one air route to another as occasion requires with an

ease impossible to any other form of transport. If it have enough; if

it is on that scale. In a few years the international air service would

represent not millions, but thousands of millions, of capital value,

and would be sustaining a vast industry beside which the motor-car

industry of the world would seem a small affair. But the business

cannot get started unless it starts with assurance and security. And

that means an initial effort quite beyond the futile pottering of

to-day. All the world at present cannot get together into one united

effort enough capital to give aviation that start.

So it doesn’t start. It doesn’t get on. It seems highly probable that

twenty years hence we shall be muckering about with air travel very

much as we are doing to-day. It will be as fitful, unpunctual, and

uncertain. The tale of needless air tragedies will have lengthened. A

great majority of air passengers will still be in the air as a rather

daring “experience” for the first and last time.

Let me repeat that I am not criticizing the galaxy of brilliant,

energetic, and enterprising people who are the magnates of the air

world to-day. I do not suggest that any one could, under these

conditions, do better than they are doing. In what may prove, I fear, a

vain effort to propitiate the air press, I am prepared to concede that

they are all without invidious exceptions quite marvellous people. What

I am saying here reflects upon their peerlessness hardly at all. I am

calling attention to the net in which their great abilities seem to

be caught, and the barriers set to their benefactions. If a shadow of

blame creeps into my comments, it is that with a modest gallantry they

make what they can out of a necessarily cramped business, and do not

complain loudly and vehemently enough against these things that prevent

them year after year from opening up those world airways that would

lead to a more united and happier life for mankind.

The crux of the business lies in the comparative under-development

of the financial and business and political worlds in respect to the

vast expansion of mechanical and economic possibility. We talk a lot of

nonsense nowadays about Big Business. There is really no Big Business

in the world to-day. No business big enough. There are a number of

banking and industrial combinations in existence much larger than

any that preceded them, and the fact that they are larger than their

predecessors blinds us to the fact that they are not large enough for

their jobs. Shipping, the world trade in many staple products, cry

aloud for unification also--but for the present let us stick to this

simple case of the air. Business is entangled with finance, finance

with politics, and when we begin to look into this riddle of why that

fifty million pounds trust does not appear, secure its concessions

and its wayleaves, and get to work upon a real world air service, we

discover, as a first effectual barrier, national boundaries. We find

every single country of the European patchwork messing about dwarfishly

with its own “national” aviation and placing every possible impediment

in the way of “foreign” air development.

Now effective air travel has to be internationalized from the start.

The aeroplane makes leaps of three or four hundred miles, and there is

hardly any sense in going up in a machine--in Europe, at least--unless

you mean to come down in another country. It is as sensible to hope for

an air transport system developed on national lines as it would be to

hope for an interoceanic railway system through the coalescence of mile

and half-mile of bits of line built, each at its own sweet will, to its

own design and gauge, by every village and township en route. Here I

will not rouse the deep and passionate emotions of patriotism in the

reader by any general condemnation of national partisanship, but from

the point of view of air development, merely and solely, nationalism is

an unmitigated nuisance.

At present the only areas of the world’s surface capable of being

brought under one control for air exploitation are firstly the

European and Asiatic areas under Soviet government, alliance,

or influence; secondly, the United States of America and their

continent; and, thirdly, the territories, protectorates, allies, and

dependents of the British Empire east and south of Palestine--as

far as Malaya, Australia, and the Cape. The development of Soviet

flying is retarded by comparative poverty and the under-development

of the huge region concerned; the United States is a railway-made

unity, with admirably organized rail transport and powerful railway

influences for air services to fight, and with none of the separating

channels, inland seas, and so forth that make flying so desirable

in the western part of the Old World; while, as for the third great

flying area, the steamship-created British Empire, it is, aerially

speaking, decapitated. You cannot fly from the British Isles to the

vast dominions round and about the Indian Ocean without infringing

foreign territory. I see no hope that any one of these three areas,

so handicapped, will be able to initiate practicable air services

for general use, and still less can I see any hope of our existing

sovereign powers going so far as to coalesce for air development with

their neighbours. That would involve a reversal of the entire drift of

nationalist feeling.

But, given such a miracle, given for example a pooling of German and

Russian and Chinese air interests, backbone lines could be created from

the North Sea to the Pacific and to Peking and Anatolia, to which every

other air line in the Old World would be compelled to articulate. But

even if one supposes a sufficient liberality of the principals to make

such an enterprise practicable, it is difficult to imagine the Foreign

Offices and the War Offices of the rest of the “Powers” permitting such

a Germano-Russian-Chinese system to develop without a great war. For if

they did not make a great war of it they would presently have to go out

of business.

These are my reasons for doubting if men will be able to use the

gift and glory of flying, fully and abundantly, for very many years

to come. We shall crawl because we are old-fashioned patriots instead

of flying as some day good cosmopolitans will. But the reaction of

our time-honoured and beloved political institutions upon flying is

not merely negative. We do not just go without this beautiful thing.

Our patriotic passions demand something more positive than that. Our

flags demand, not only abstinences, but blood and burnt offerings. If,

on the one hand, the custodians of our national distinctness block

the development of safe flying, they do, on the other hand, work with

considerable vigour to develop dangerous flying. However much air

transport may limp and lag, there is no cessation of research, within

the limits of the military intelligence, into the possibilities of war

aviation.

In the year 1926, a year of profound peace, technically speaking, the

English R.A.F. killed eighty-three young men. The numbers killed show a

considerable advance upon 1925. France, Italy, America show comparable

losses. Germany, lucky land, does not appear in this massacre. She is

forbidden to kill her young aviators in spite of all patriotic cravings

to do so; she is devoting them therefore to an air transport service

that in spite of many handicaps is already the best in Europe. Since

the Great Peace, while you and I have been going about our various

little concerns, some thousands of young men, not common young men,

but picked human beings, exceptionally courageous and well bred and

well made, have been dashed to pieces and burnt alive, to the end that

when presently the nations have sufficiently forgotten the last war to

be guided into the next, flying shall not fail in its contribution to

the spectacle. These splendid young men have been killed, just as the

carefully chosen youths of the Aztec nation were killed, to propitiate

the national gods. Even in peace-time these sacred monsters had to be

kept alive by the blood of the young. These gallant youngsters have

been learning to fly in hazardous ways, or they have been practising

the throwing of explosive bombs and poison bombs at the imaginary homes

and refuges of offending foreigners below, and they have paid the

penalty. Very great advances, we are assured, are being made every year

in the destructiveness, deadliness, and general disgustingness of the

air offensive at the price of these deaths.

There is no need to elaborate this monstrous contrast further. What

has been said is sufficient to establish the thesis that for a century

human affairs have been developing at an unequal pace, that while our

economic and political ideas and methods have made only sluggish and

insecure advances, mechanical science has so progressed as entirely

to outscale them. This instance of the air is only one vivid instance

of what is happening to most of the economic and industrial affairs

of mankind. Governments are not helping, not fostering, the huge

and desirable reorganizations that are possible. Politicians live

by keeping alive feuds and hatreds. Governments subsist upon old

sentiments and traditions; there is no such thing as a progressive

creative Government in the world anywhere, to accept and use in a full

and proper fashion the gifts science and invention now hold out to us.

The chief recognition of progress by Governments everywhere takes the

form of attempts to turn the gifts of progress into weapons to kill

progress. And the chief riddle before mankind on its way to that world

peace, that larger, happier, nobler, and fuller life which certainly

awaits it, is the riddle of how to introduce into its methods of

government that idea of progress, which has given us the key to these

vast treasures, and so convert the nationalist parochialisms of to-day,

stage by stage and surely and conclusively, into the world commonweal,

which is the essential condition of their exploitation.

_20 February, 1927._