THE WORLD AND THE AIR "
SIR,—I have been so busy trying to get into the air that I have had little time to attend to more mundane matters. Belatedly, I notice two errors in your otherwise excellent article, " The World and the Air," of October 2oth. One of them is your statement that under the Act which brought it into being the B.O.A.C. was constituted as " the single British concern approved to operate services from this country to different parts of the world." This requires qualification. You say further, and this is the second error, that legislation is required to abrogate its monopoly.
What the B.O.A. Act of 1939 gave to the Corporation was not a monopoly of services abroad, but merely a monopoly of subsidised services. There is nothing whatsoever in the Act to prevent any private concerns from running overseas services sp long as they do not claim a subsidy. In point of fact, at least three organisations (I am the chairman of one of them) have already offered to do this. What prevents them from getting into the air is no Act of Parliament, but the indecision of the Government and all that that entails. True, some Government spokesmen have been disingenuous enough to say, " There is nothing to prevent the private companies from running a service abroad," which is true ; but when they are faced with a determination to do so, they hedge by exclaiming, "Do you then want to repel the B.O.A Act?" No! All that we private companies desire is a strict reading of the Act as it stands.—Yours faithfully, J. W. Boom, Chairman, British Latin American Air Lines, Limited. z4 Leadenhall Street, London, E.C. 3.
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