A NEW ZEALANDER IN CENTRAL AMERICAEvening Post, 2 November 1940
This picture of Mr. Lowell Yerex was taken when he was in the Royal Air Force during the World War.THE world's most successful airline — a commercial air transport company that makes a profit carrying barefoot Indian passengers, drums of oil, tons of dried beef, and bags of bottled beer over dense Central American jungles, has its headquarters here, wrote Wayne Thomis from Tegucigalpa, Honduras, to the "Chicago Tribune" recently. The company is incorporated as Transportes Aereos Centro Americanos —but it is known from Mexico to the canal as TACA.
Literally TACA is the life-line of many communities in Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. TACA's aeroplanes—mostly Ford trimotors that went out of service in the United States seven years ago—furnish the only means of entrance and exit for many towns in the jungle country.
TACA's service is so regular and reliable that the mule trails and Indian paths that connect these communities with civilisation have grown over and become lost through disuse. TACA brings in new workers to the mining towns, supplies food, drink, and mining machinery, and it flies out the dead, and even on occasions acts as peacemaker in a revolution.
It is quite a coincidence that Central America has had peace since the first month TACA started its operations, some nine years ago. At that time Lowell Yerex, a New Zealander who attended Valparaiso University at Valparaiso, Indiana, and later served in the Royal Flying Corps in the World War—was the sole pilot of the company.
He had one four-place Stinson Junior aeroplane, with a 200-horsepower motor. Using this aeroplane for bombing and machine-gun attacks —the gun was fired by a passenger who lay on the floor and shot out the door— Yerex "scattered the enemy" and enabled the forces under General Tibureia Carias Andino to win.
The general became President —he still is in office today.
Yerex was given concessions for flying all over Honduras. Today he owns 52 planes and operates in British Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador. Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Panama. The line claims it has not injured a passenger in three years. It has succeeded in countries so poor that the average income of the 10,000,000 Spanish, Indian, and Negro population is under £10 a year.
Yerex had only 200 Mexican pesos —about £11 —to his name when he arrived here.
With the revolution over Yerex began flying from Tegucigalpa, capital of Honduras, to San Pedro on the Atlantic coast, and to Choluteca on the Pacific side. He drummed up business by carrying a crate of oranges for one grocer and a bag of cabbages for another. He constantly told each merchant what the other was doing and soon had a regular freight business established. Soon he had more than he could handle.
The company at one time had thirty Ford trimotors. It lost a few, usually from engine failures at take-off from tiny jungle fields, but still has twenty. In addition Yerex bought up Bellanca and Travelair monoplanes, four Stinson mailwing biplanes, and one Steeman mailwing biplane, and recently bought five Lockheed 14's —the latest and finest small airliners on sale in the United States, and three Curtiss Condors for reserve.
Some of the Lockheed planes owned by TACAYerex lines now serve 235 towns and cities —most of them from ten minutes to an hour's flight, apart. New fields are constantly being opened by engineers experienced at cutting airports out of the jungles.
TACA was doing all right with straight freight and passenger business even before the Nicaraguan and Honduran mines opened up again.
Then TACA went to town,for Yerex obtained contracts to supply the mines with all their necessities. These even included enormously heavy steam shovels, sulphide tanks, rolling and crushing machinery, and Diesel engines. When Yerex got the first of these contracts he rebuilt his Ford planes. Steel beams were put on the floor so that the machine, licensed for 2500lb of payload in the United States, would carry up to 5000lb in the cabin. He installed trick doors that gave an opening six meters wide for loading and unloading heavy pieces. These doors were arranged so they slide like a roll-top desk up and around the fuselage, with handles so they could be opened from inside. This has proved wise for when the Fords developed engine trouble, it has been necessary to dump cargo out into the jungle.
In one of these freighters Yerex's expert pilots have flown pieces of huge flywheels weighing up to 5300lb. One Ford had a 400 gallon tank welded into its inside, which, when full, means a fuel weight of 2800lb.
Two years ago TACA got a contract to haul supplies in, and chicle out, of the Peten jungles in Guatemala, where the Wrigley Company and the United Chicle Company have vast plantations. TACA's experienced men serve them under all conditions of weather.
This country is so bad that two fields, Dos Lagunas and Carmelita, are only ten minutes apart in a plane, but are ten days by mule in good weather and fifteen in the rainy season. From these two and other Peten fields TACA carried the entire chicle crop of more than 2,000,000lb of the grey, puttylike gum in 150lb boxes last year. This year a bumper crop is promised and TACA expects to carry 5,000.000lb of gum alone.
In 1939 TACA carried 65,000 passengers, 22,000,000lb of freight, 3,500,000lb of mail, and much baggage and express. For the first half of 1940 the company has carried 48,350 passengers, and 12,583,580lb of freight. TACA's passenger and freight rates are probably the lowest in the world. Fares for passengers between points also served by Pan-American Airways here run about 50 per cent less than Pan-American charges. A recent inventory showed that the company's physical assets today—including the fleet of planes and the repair base at Tegucigalpa, which is the finest of its kind between Brownsville and the army bases at the Canal Zone—amount to 3,000,000 dollars.
This map shows the network of services which Taca has created in Central America. The heavy line shows a route on which planes make an hourly run; the others are daily schedules.
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