"The businessmen who are laying out the nation's passenger airlines have not yet devised any rite for the opening of a new line comparable to the railroad rite of Driving the Golden Spike. At the opening last week of one more new artery of air travel—Eastern Air Transport's line between Atlanta and New York?—one spike-driver, had there been a spike to drive, would have been brusque, bulky Capt. Thomas Bartwell Doe, U. S. A. retired, famed West Point footballer, E. A. T.'s president. And another would have been tall, angular, pipe-smoking Frederic Gallup Coburn, president of American Airways, Inc. whose Atlanta-Los Angeles and New York-Boston-Montreal lines the E. A. T. stretch now connects.

Instead of spike-driving, these two gentlemen and a convivial party of 58— including Postmaster General Brown, Superintendent Earl Wadsworth of the U. S. airmail service, Vice-Chairman Graham Bethune Grosvenor of Aviation Corp. (holding company of American Airways), Poloist-Banker J. Cheever Cowdin of Bancamerica-Blair, and many a wife— repaired the night before the line's opening to Atlanta's smart Piedmont Driving Club for a banquet. Georgia's Governor Hardman and Atlanta's Mayor Ragsdale made speeches.

Next morning from Candler Field, "the Coca-Cola airport," the party—all were deadheads—took off without ceremony in two great 18-passenger Curtiss Condors, deep brown with grey wings, and two new Curtiss Kingbirds (orange with brown wings), and a Ford and a Fokker.

First sight to make the passengers crane their necks was the grey mass of the Federal Penitentiary, three miles east of their northeasterly course. Less than 15 min. later loomed a greater landmark— Stone Mountain, where an air beacon flashes above the monster unfinished carvings for the Confederacy memorial.

Across Georgia's boundary and through most of South Carolina the terrain is rolling pinewoods, fields of broomstraw, greywhite cotton acres ruled off with black furrows. Beyond Spartanburg, S. C. the passengers could see King's Mountain thrusting its razor back out of the foothills. From Charlotte to Greensboro, N. C. the carpet of earth is dotted with milltowns: a single, great smoke-belching building or group of buildings surrounded by straggling rows of little dwellings. At Winston-Salem, east of the course, rises the Camel Cigaret Factory. Then the course goes via Appomattox over the red clay farmlands and scrub forests of eastern Virginia to Richmond's Richard E. Byrd Field. An hour later the plane slips into Hoover-Washington Airport. Here the pilot makes a careful check of weather ahead: fogs from the Chesapeake Bay and Delaware River may be wet.-Setting out again the plane cuts halfway between the Capitol and Washington Monument.

En route to Baltimore's Logan Field the traveler can look down upon the Patapsco fc (Water-Of-Many-White-Caps) River at the spot where, on a British warship in 1814, Prisoner Francis Scott Key wrote "The Star Spangled Banner." Far to the east are the smoke and glare of the great new Bethlehem Steel mills. North of Baltimore planes detour to give a wide berth to the Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground. Thence: Havre de Grace racetrack; Philadelphia's desolate Sesquicentennial Exposition site; Hog Island; the

Delaware River where within ten minutes the plane darts from Delaware to New Jersey to Pennsylvania and back to New Jersey. The last leg of the northbound flight raises the grey spires of Princeton before the plane drops down on the smoke-plumed Jersey meadows at Newark Airport."

TIME, 12/1932