new attitude on the part of the traveling public entered the picture. Airlines began to be accepted as a necessity, like railroads and bus lines. Increasingly it became apparent that there was a need for frequency of service and lowered fares. Airplanes sometimes offered no advantages over ground facilities in time saving, if they didn’t fly often enough to be a convenience to passengers. For instance, a man who wished, say, to go to Cleveland from New York might find a plane left for the west once a day at nine o’clock in the morning. If he couldn’t leave until noon, he could make better time by taking a train that night and arriving at Cleveland about the time the next plane was leaving from New York. But the operators couldn’t be expected to put on a heavy schedule to accommodate only a few customers. To reach enough to justify several additional trips a day, it was obvious fares had to be reduced.
While some operators were engrossed with the problem of the long haul, others, equally pioneering, studied those of shorter routes at higher speeds. In Transcontinental Air Transport, I came to know Gene Vidal and Paul Collins, both members of that organization. Collins, who was superintendent of operations, had been a famous air mail flyer with, as I remember it, 8000 hours to his credit. A great pilot himself, he understood the background of airplanes and other pilots.
Vidal, an ex-army flyer and engineer, had been on the technical staff of T. A. T. His interest and
