Air Transport Industries in Wartime

Abstract

COMMERCIAL transport of passengers and mail by private companies maintaining scheduled services dates from the awarding of mail contracts to private contractors in 1926. Accordingly this form of transport was slightly more than fifteen years old when Pearl Harbor thrust the Nation again into global conflict. For the first time in the United States, civil air transport was called upon to meet the challenge presented by a war of great magnitude. As a background for portraying the status of commercial air transport in the United States at the close of 1941, let us review briefly the salient aspects of those fifteen years of economic change. Commercial air transportation began in the speculative twenties, and experienced its first boom as that decade was closing. Emulating the history of the older forms of transport, its first consolidation movement appeared as the Nation passed into the depressed thirties. The depression years with their aftermath of political and economic uncertainty retarded, though they did not stop, the advance of aviation. The strong promotional effects of the Air Mail Act of 1925 and the Air Commerce Act of 1926 were followed in the early thirties by government efforts to stimulate the growth of passenger traffic in the air and reduce the compensation for maintaining airmail service. The cancellation of the mail contracts, and their subsequent restoration at reduced rates of compensation late in 1934, provided a further stimulus toward development of passenger business, and was accompanied by the divorce of air transport from the manufacture of aircraft, with which it had been intimately associated since 1926. In 1938 the passage of the Civil Aeronautics Act, with regulatory provisions pertaining to safety of operation, inauguration of services, and rates charged therefor--closely patterning those pertaining to railroads and highway carriers-provided the industry with a legal institution, a regulatory tribunal, and a promotional administration. The increasing tempo of economic and political change may be illustrated by these comparisons: while nearly forty years elapsed between railroad beginnings and state regulation thereof (and almost sixty years before the Federal Government intervened), and twenty-five years passed between the inception of intercity bus transport and its regulation by the Federal Government, commercial air transport attained Federal status within thirteen