This fundamental issue, long bitterly fought behind the scenes, had previously burst into the open at Chicago during the first meeting of the International Civil Aviation Conference. The United States State Department, ably represented by Adolphe Berle, had fought hard for the “five freedoms,” a modern counterpart of the old doctrine of freedom of the seas. Against the powerful opposition of certain foreign governments, notably that of Great Britain, the United States, weakened by the inner controversy, had been forced to settle for three of its five freedoms. This same issue now confused the Air Transport Association’s presentation before the Finletter Board. On this rock, a second great objective of the inquiry, an investigation of the reasonableness of regulation, was scuttled. After exhaustive inquiry, the Finletter Board recommended numerous improvements as to policy in its report “Survival in the Air Age.” The Congressional Aviation Policy Board, after waiting for this report, issued its findings on March 1, 1948, in a joint-committee print entitled “National Aviation Policy.” But with echoes of Hiroshima still ringing in the ears of the investigators, air force displaced air commerce in top billing. The Congressional Board held frankly that a strong, stable, and modern civil aviation component is essential to air power for national security and that domestic and foreign commerce of the United States should be promoted by whatever means appear most practical until it reaches such stature in passenger and cargo capacity as to constitute in a crisis an adequate logistical arm of the national defense establishment. In other words, air commerce exists to support the armed forces. We in the aircraft industry had naïvely insisted that it must be the other way around. With the Congressional Committee’s profound observation on the place of civil air transport in air power, and its denial of the first premise of the aircraft industry’s air-power policy, we lost our third great objective.