International Air Transport

Report Outline
Negotiations on Postwar Air Transportation
Air Transport Questions Before Congress
Air Transport and International Relations

Negotiations on Postwar Air Transportation

Plans for New International Air Convention

Problems of international air traffic after the war are at present receiving the attention of the State Department, the Civil Aeronautics Board, and two committees of the United States Senate. Commercial air transport got its start as the result of technological improvements made under the pressure of World War I. It is expected to undergo a revolutionary expansion as the result of new techniques and methods developed out of the flying experience gained in World War. II.

Officials in both the United States and British governments hold that a new international convention will be needed after the war for the establishment of machinery to assure order in the greatly increased international air traffic. Before the war this traffic was loosely governed under two international conventions, one adopted 20 years before the establishment of the first transAtlantic air service, the other, a Western Hemisphere agreement, now 16 years old and not sufficiently inclusive to serve as an effective instrument. “Both of these conventions,” wrote Vice Chairman Warner of the Civil Aeronautics Board, “have been interpreted and applied in the sense most unfortunate to the free expansion of international air services.”

The two prewar conventions are the International Air Convention of Paris, October, 1919, and the Pan American Convention of Havana, 1928. Before the outbreak of the present war, the Paris Convention had an effective membership of 33 states, but two countries conspicuous in air navigation, the United States and Germany, were not among them. The Pan American Convention was subscribed to by the United States, Mexico, Chile and Ecuador, all the Central American states (except Salvador) and the Caribbean states (except Cuba), but it was ignored by most of the South American states.