Advent of the long-range airplane which could lift a substantial payload presented the first opportunity in more than one hundred years to accelerate the delivery of goods across water barriers. Modern steam freighters carrying the bulk of the world's goods move little faster than the clipper sailing ships of our early American days. The impact of air transportation on international trade has been and will be, therefore, far more profound than it is on the domestic scene where between the wagon train and the airplane we had the railroad and the truck. International air freight reduces to about one-twentieth the time consumed in spanning the oceans. Speed is, so to speak, the raison d'etre of air freight; its concomitants are the elements which make shipping of many products by air at higher rates more economical than shipping by ocean freighter at lower rates. But a caution on speed of itself is necessary at the outset. Ever increasing speed, however desirable in passenger and mail carriage, must not become an obsession in freight. The economic justification for international air freight accrues from a combination of speed, direct flight to destination, and personal attention to the goods carried. From each of these, or a combination, stem the concrete economic gains. Compression of time in transportation has preoccupied man since the exchange of goods began, because any kind of property in transit is idle, worthless, and profitconsuming. The astute manufacturer, importer, or exporter will always think of distances as time, and not miles. The logistically minded men of the Air Transport Command had such lessons ground into them by the rough edge of war. Major General William Tunner, of Military Air Transport Command and genius of the Berlin Airlift, recently set forth graphically what is involved in loss by a routine replacement of i,ooo men in the Panama Canal Zone. To carry i,ooo men to Panama by ship and bring I,ooo out, he said, involved a loss of 34,000 man-days. Movement of the same number by airplane cost 4,000 man-days. The General invited his listeners, members of the Commerce and Industry Association of New York, to consider what they could pick up free by changing their means of transportation. Delivery of goods in a day or two instead of weeks means drastic shortening of the profitless transit period, whether the goods be merchandise or machinery; it means eliminating the need for large inventories, hence less capital tie-up; it means less warehousing, faster re-orders, and the opportunity to meet the peak demand. It cuts the risks of encountering exchange fluctuations, and speeds collections. Direct flight means over-flying of congested ports and bringing inland cities to