Inquiry Into Operations of the United States Air Services

Thursday, February 19, 1925. The committee met, pursuant to adjournment on yesterday, at 10 o'clock a. m. in the caucus room in the House of Representatives Office Building, Hon. Florian Lampert (chairman) presiding.

Present: Messrs. Lampert (chairman), Perkins, Reid, Prall, and O'Sullivan.

Mr. PERKINS. The committee will please come to order. We have for this morning Senator Bingham. Senator, will you please come forward?

STATEMENT OF HON. HIRAM BINGHAM. A SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF CONNECTICUT

Mr. PERKINS, Senator Bingham, this select committee of inquiry into the conditions of aircraft in our country has requested you, knowing your deep interest in the subject of aircraft and flying, to come before it to give us a statement concerning your views of this very important subject. Will you be good enough to give us a statement?

Senator BINGHAM. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I am sorry that I have not had more time to prepare for this. I only received word that you desired to have me come last night, just as we were going into a night session of the Senate, and we kept going until 11 o'clock, and there were a number of bills in which I was interested, so I have not had an opportunity to prepare. So I ventured to bring with me a book which I wrote about a year and a half after the war, from which, with your permission I would like to refresh my memory from time to time.

The first thing which I think Congress should do to aid aviation is to pass a bill establishing a bureau of civil aeronautics. We are the only country in the world that has a bureau of ocean navigation that has no bureau of air navigation. I learned some years ago that you could not take a passenger across the Connecticut River in a motor boat and charge him 10 cents unless your boat had been inspected and passed upon by a Federal official as seaworthy and you had passed an examination as a person competent to run a motor boat. And yet at the present time you can buy any old junk aircraft, if you know how to fly or if you do not, and take it to some resort and persuade people to pay you $10 to take them up in the air while you show them the scenery without the Government examining that plane for airworthiness or as to being in sound condition or examination of you as to your ability to fly. As a result of this, a number of people have been killed in rather spectacular accidents. I remember a year or two ago I am not sure of the date-in Miami-you may remember the date, Mr. Chairman-a family from Kansas. City

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and their friends went in a seaplane to fly from Miami to Nassau, and they were all lost at sea, and all of them were killed. The pilot was found afterwards clinging to the wreckage in a more or less demented condition. I was told by my friends who were pilots, and who were wholly familiar with the situation along the water front in Miami, that the plane was not fit to fly; that the companion plane could hardly get off the water when it was called upon to go to the rescue of the plane that had been lost; that the pilot had been trained on a land plane and had never had real training in a flying boat.

Mr. PERKINS. May I interrupt you there, Senator?

Senator BINGHAM. Certainly.

Mr. PERKINS. The president of the company that operated that plane testified they had to go out of business because of their old equipment and inability to keep it up.

Senator BINGHAM. I see you are thoroughly familiar with the case. Mr. PERKINS. Yes, sir.

Senator BINGHAM. What I wanted to bring out was that there was a case where there was destruction of human life; and not only that, but it put air navigation a year or two years back, because people do not want to take the chance of navigation of the air after seeing what happened there, and because the Government puts no stamp of approval on a plane as to airworthiness or on the pilots, signifying that they are capable of piloting planes.

I believe that the first thing that the Congress or the House of Representatives could do for the development of aviation in the United States would be to give immediate consideration to the passage of this act which the Senate passed a year ago, the Wadsworth bill, which has been amended by the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce of the House, under the chairmanship of Mr. Winslow. Mr. Winslow and his committee have spent a year studying the subject. They have prepared what seems to me to be a very excellent measure. They have amended the measure as it passed the Senate. It was reported into the House a month ago, and I believe the most important thing is to pass it in the House and send it back to the Senate and let us have a conference on it. That is the first suggestion I would make, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. PERKINS. That is S. 76?

Senator BINGHAM. S. 76. It is on the Union Calendar, 486.

I do not think that many people appreciate that aids to navigation have been provided by the Government. The Government provides a mapping of the shoals; it provides buoys; it maintains lighthouses; it gives information as to the weather conditions; it provides coast guards and a lire-saving service and many other aids to navigation. You could not have ocean navigation if you did not have buoys and the maps and charts and lighthouses and the other aids of which I have spoken. Not one of these things is provided for aviation. And yet we pride ourselves on the fact that we are the people who started aviation. Our planes are as good as the planes of any country in the world, and yet we have not done a thing in the way of aiding civil aviation, except that we did pass a bill a little while ago giving the Postmaster General the right to make contracts, as you remember, with any one for the delivery of air mail between any points, on a contract basis, a bill which I think has very great possi

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Inquiry Into Operations of the United States Air Services, Volumes 4-6