Commercial aviation is altogether state owned and is operated by an office in the Department of Automotive, Maritime, and Air Transportation that, with the Department of Railroads, is part of the Ministry of Transportation. Romanian Air Transport--always referred to in common and in most official usage as TAROM, derived from Transporturi Aeriene Romane--serves a dozen or more cities in the country and contacts about twenty national capitals outside the country. These include Moscow, all of the capitals of the Warsaw Treaty Organization (Warsaw Pact) member nations, and about a dozen capitals in Western Europe and the Middle East. Service to nearly all of the external points consists of no more than one round trip flight weekly to each. Domestic service has expanded steadily since 1950 but varies throughout the year to provide more frequent trips during the holiday and tourist seasons. The line carries some cargo but an insignificant amount when compared with other modes of transportation. It has, however, begun to carry a more significant number of passengers. This traffic increased from less than 40,000 in 1950 to about 780,000 in 1969. Each year since 1965 it has carried approximately 100,000 more passengers than in the year preceding. Pipelines Most liquid petroleum products and natural gas are moved via pipeline. The largest network of liquid lines serves the large oilfield in the Ploiesti area and the smaller one in west-central Walachia. They connect the fields with refineries and transport the refined products to Danube River ports and to Constanta on the Black Sea coast. Lines also transfer crude oil from the Moldavian oilfield to its refineries, but there were no lines in 1970 to transport finished products from those refineries. Natural gas is piped to all parts of Transylvania from sources in the center of the province, but the Carpathians are an obstacle to its distribution to other parts of the country. One major line crosses the Transylvanian Alps to serve the Bucharest area, and another crosses the Moldavian Carpathians through Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. It serves areas to the southeast as far as Galati, on the Danube River. Merchant Marine The country has a small, but growing, merchant marine. Although most of its ships are new, the more than 100 percent increase--to nearly 0.5 million deadweight tons--claimed to have been achieved between 1967 and 1969 was accounted for by less than a dozen ships, consisting of two tankers and some bulk cargo carriers that were built in Japan. The government releases no official statistics on its merchant fleet, but fragmentary information indicates that before 1967 it consisted of about thirty-five ships. One of them was a 2,000-deadweight-ton passenger-cargo vessel, and there were a few tankers totaling something over 100,000 deadweight tons. The remainder were freighters, averaging about 5,000 deadweight tons each.