Lord Weir, Secretary of State for the Royal Air Force,
in an address delivered in Manchester on Friday week, made an interesting and extremely important addition to the information possessed by the man in the street regarding his approaching transmutation into the man in the air. War necessities have hitherto limited his chances of acquiring such knowledge as was the daily commonplace of the aerodrome. Perhaps he heard, casually, some months ago,- that a Handley-Page had carried two Rugby football teams (thirty men) from a rendezvous in London to an outlying football enclosure ; and if he possessed any imagination, well, that fact must have suggested to him many possibilities in the after-war development of a service which, as Lord Weir told his audience, had last month a personnel of thirty thousand officers, two hundred and sixty thousand men, and about thirty thousand women and' boys. That army, with its machines and other plant, is the nucleus of a trans- port service, of a public utility, which within a few years may rival in importance transport by land and water.
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