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HISTORY AND HARD HEADS
TEXT 1
A GLIMPSE OF AIRPORT
Baggage handling is the least efficient part of air travel. An astounding amount of airline baggage goes to wrong destinations, is delayed, or lost entirely. Airport executives point woefully to the many opportunities for human error which exists with baggage handling.
Freight is now going aboard Flight Two in a steady stream. So is mail. The heavier-than-usual mail load is a bonus for Trans America. A Flight of British Overseas Airways Corporation, scheduled to leave shortly before Trans America Flight, has just announced a three-hour delay. The post office supervisor, who keeps constant watch on schedules and delays, promptly ordered a switch of mail from the BOAC airliner to Trans America. The British airline will be unhappy because carriage of mail is highly profitable, and competition for post office business keen. All airlines keep uniformed representatives at airport post offices, their job to keep an eye on the flow of mail and ensure that their own airline got a "fair share" - or more - of the outgoing volume. Post office supervisors sometimes have favourites among the airline men and see to it that business comes their way. But in cases of delay, friendship doesn't count. At such moments there is an inflexible rule: the mail goes by the fastest route.
Inside the terminal is Trans America Control Centre. The centre is a bustling, jam-packed, noisy conglomeration of people, desks, telephones, teletypes, private-line TV and information boards. Its personnel are responsible for directing the preparation of all Trans America flights. On occasions like tonight with schedules chaotic because of the storm, the atmosphere is pandemoniac, the scene resembling an old-time newspaper city room, as seen by Hollywood.
TEXT 2
HISTORY AND HARD HEADS
Never in the long range of history has the world been in such a state of flux as it is today. Never has there been so much anxious questioning, so much doubt and bewilderment, so much examining of old institutions, existing ills, and suggested remedies. There is a continuous process of change and revolution going all over the world, and anxious statesmen are at their wits' end and grope about in the dark. It is obvious that we are a part of this great world problem, and must be affected by world events. And yet little attempt is made to understand forces that are shaking and reforming the world before our eyes. Without this understanding history, whether past or present, becomes just a magic show with no lesson for us which might guide our future path. On the gaily-decked official stage phantom figures come and go, posing for a while as great statesmen. Their main concern is how to save the vested interests of various classes or groups; their main diversion, apart from feasting, is self-praise. Some people, blissfully ignorant of all that has happened in the last half-century, still talk the jargon of the Victorian Age and are surprised and resentful that nobody listens to them. Even the Nasmyth hammer of war and revolution and world change has failed to produce the slightest dent on their remarkably hard heads.
TEXT 3