Alaska-Siberia air route

This new road is the Alaska-Siberia route. Its bases and the necessary knowledge of weather and experience with flying conditions have been developed with unprecedented speed by the need for a fast, safe route over which planes could be ferried from American factories to Soviet fighting fronts.

As a result of these developments Alaska has moved up to a new position and a new importance in the American scheme of things. Alaskan flying fields for land-based aircraft will very likely challenge in importance the romantic Treasure Island Clipper base at San Francisco's Golden Gate.

The rivalry will not be one of parallel competing routes, but of altogether different approaches to the far mainland of Asia, each with its own advantages for American enterprise and America's now vast and diversified resources in planes, flying personnel, and flying know-how.

The first principle of the Alaska-Siberia route is north for safety. The Aleutian Island steppingstones to Asia look more attractive on the map than they do to the pilots and navigators on whom has fallen the grim responsibility of combat flying in Aleutian fog and rain. They know that the Aleutians lie in one of the most treacherous temperature belts in the world, where the air is full of moisture suspended at a temperature just cool enough so that the rush of a plane's wings will make it condense as ice.

Farther to the north it is cold enough so that on more days in the year the moisture in the air condenses and falls, leaving a safe path for aircraft. Therefore, the new route will avoid islands and head straight from Alaska to Seimchan or Yakutsk on the mainland of Asia.

Yakutsk, occupying in the Soviet Subarctic much the same relative position that Fairbanks occupies in Alaska, is the vantage point from which to look at the mainland air approach to Asia.

From Fairbanks the main flight lanes lead not to our Pacific coast, but straight to the heart of North America, east of the Canadian Rockies, across the Peace River country and the wheatlands of Alberta and Saskatchewan, and down to such points as Minneapolis, Omaha, and Chicago.

From Yakutsk the flight lanes also run "downhill"-across Outer Mongolia to the heart of China; through Soviet Central Asia and thence either to Calcutta on the eastern side of India or Bombay on the western side …"