Response 2 Wings of silver, wings of gold: Money and technological change in the aircraft industry during the 1920s and 1930s

Abstract

It is questionable whether there was a true changeover from ‘wood’ to metal around 1930. In practice, the two construction technologies had coexisted for decades. During those decades of coexistence ‘metal’ was not a challenge to ‘wooden’ construction — and for good reason. ‘Wood’ provided a relatively low-cost, flexible material, eminently suited to the type of practical engineering that was dominant in the industry of the day. The aircraft business was a small-scale industry. Until the second half of the 1920s the industry was also dominated by the entrepreneurial pilot-constructors who had personally put up the money for their companies. To build aircraft in metal, most producers lacked the knowledge, experience and — above all — the means. Materials other than wood simply made no economic sense, except for a few well-funded military projects. Only when, in the second half of the 1920s, serious corporate investment in the aircraft industry became fashionable in the United States, did the industry enter into a new phase in which the various theoretical and practical notions that had been accumulated, could be combined in designs for a new generation of aircraft. In the United States the aviation industry witnessed the rise to prominence of various hitherto minor producers, who happened to be well suited to combine money and knowledge into designs that were specifically aimed at outperforming the hitherto dominant ‘Fokker’ types of airliners. Indeed, the way to compete with the dominant technological standard of the day was to offer something radically new. Airline operators were persuaded to buy these new ‘standardised’ aircraft because they offered far better operating economics than the existing types. In the case of the DC-2, operating costs were some twenty percent lower than those of contemporary Fokker models [12]. Added to that was the circumstance that the dominant producers of civil transport aircraft in the United States, Fokker and Curtiss, both aimed for a market development that did not come about — and therefore produced aircraft no-one would buy. In summary, economics, not engineering fashion, was the dominant factor in the changeover from one technological regime to the other.