What happens
This episode of The Pacific Story, part of the United Nations series, examines the air routes linking North America with Asia. It opens with a Chicago airline officer discussing a great circle flight to Tokyo with an air pioneer, who plans to study the northern route and its weather. The program then traces the development of the Alaska-Siberia route, the Pacific airmail service begun in 1935, and wartime airfields across the Pacific. It also covers postwar negotiations over international air traffic rights and the question of whether Soviet airspace will be open to American airlines. The transcript provided covers only the first part of the episode.
The United States, Alaska, Siberia, the Pacific islands, Australia, and an international air conference in Chicago, spanning the 1930s to the postwar period.
Characters: Ben, Mac, Captain Edwin Musick, Wendell Willkie, Freddie, Marge, Raskin
Listen for: The debate at the Chicago Air Conference over the five freedoms of the air, and the discussion of whether the Soviet Union will permit American airlines across Siberia.
Written from the episode itself; it never gives away the ending. Every recording is remastered for the stream: cleaned of rumble, hiss and mains hum (and the old TV whine where we found it), then levelled in two passes to steady broadcast loudness, so one show is never quieter than the next.