Airports and Landing Fields

Abstract

W ITH the steady growth of commercial aeronautics, and the establishment of airways criss-crossing the United States, the necessity for well designed airports becomes apparent. The city without an airport will be in the same class as a coastal city without a well-equipped harbor. Cities and nations, like individuals, achieve material progress in proportion as they possess pioneering minds and the courage to make plans and follow them through. The genius of America has been in the ability of its people to sense the trend of development, and to brave temporary inconvenience for the larger benefits towards which they aim. Few of our national undertakings have been able to offer immediate profit, and none of them have failed to be enormously profitable in the end. In our generation we have seen the automobile emerge from a thing of ridicule to revolutionize land travel and transportation. Perhaps to no other one thing does the South owe its present prominence in national affairs than to this mechanical infant of yesterday. In this generation, also, another great factor has come into the life of the nations-men have learned to fly. Urged by influences far greater than behind any other national venture, the airplane hovers over our cities today, asking the hospitality of safe landing fields. Backed by industrial' and social need, these ships of the air have not found pioneer spirits lacking to develop and fly them, nor can communities refuse their service, and continue to retain their place in the industrial competition, which is sweeping forward in a test of civic strength a d the right of communities to commercial life. Within the last twelve months commercial aviation has emerged from the obscurity of doubt and uncertainty to a condition of fact which challenges the attention of all. We stand upon the th eshold of an era of flying. Given some place to start from, s me place to go to, and a route over which to fly, an airplane will develop air traffic as well as help develop the citi s and communities between which it flies.