The purpose which Air Transport should be designed to serve is, I suspect, all too often confused or ignored. I think that the essential contribution which Air Transport has to make to modern civilisation can be expressed, quite simply, in two words:—

Improved communications lead to traffic—both traffic robbed from older and less convenient forms of transport, and new traffic created by the new medium. Carriage of traffic is the fundamental task of all forms of transport. Air Transport, alone unimpeded by geographical barriers, has traffic-carrying potentials which are still largely unexplored, whether that traffic be passengers, freight or mails—businessmen to Brussels, honeymooners to Honolulu, or coals to Berlin. In the same way, estimates of traffic must form the basis of all operational planning and set the scale against which airline fleets and frequencies should be projected in terms of date as well as numbers.