The application of heavier-than-air flight for civil transportation became a worldwide goal almost immediately after that epic first flight at Kitty Hawk. By the mid-20s airlines had formed in a handful of nations, mostly in North America and Western Europe. The principle difference between the U.S. carriers and their foreign counterparts—one that persists to this day—materialized at once; most of the latter were heavily subsidized by their governments. Nations such as Germany and France, particularly, had seen their railroad nets all but destroyed in the Great War, and sought to replace them with this grand new invention. The fledgling airlines that sprung up throughout Europe were in fact thinly veiled arms of the governments.
In the U.S. however, where the vast majority of travelers were still perfectly content to travel by rail, air carriers survived by bidding competitively for mail contracts. Dozens of routes were established, and the precursors of most of our most familiar airlines (Pan Am, American, United, TWA, etc.) settled into the routine of hauling mail and the occasional curious (but paying) passenger. They were paid by the Postal Service about thirty cents to a few dollars for every pound of mail they shipped. Most of them endeavored to sweeten their margins a little by airmailing cast iron stoves and sacks of lead back and forth across the country.
Passenger traffic inevitably became more important to U.S. carriers as the years went by, especially as trust-busting legislators sought to break up the comfortable backroom deals the airlines had formed among themselves and with the Postal Service. Aircraft manufacturers—especially Boeing, Douglas and Lockheed—began designing planes configured more for comfort than for hauling capacity. Air traffic got steadily heavier, to the point that nervous pilots began clamoring for some sort of air traffic control system. The first such control apparatus appeared in 1935 at Newark, then the country’s busiest airport. Chicago and Cleveland quickly followed suit.
Air traffic was placed under the aegis of the Commerce Department. An official of that department, Eugene Vidal (Gore Vidal’s father) undertook to codify air traffic control operations. His efforts resulted in the 1937 Civil Air Regulations, and the 1938 Civil Aeronautics Act.
New Deal legislation by Franklin Roosevelt, meanwhile, was resulting in the creation of new, and the expansion of existing regional airfields all across the country, mostly by Works Progress Administration (WPA) laborers. War paranoia was to later intensify these activities; a 1940 presidential initiative called DLAND (Development of Landing Areas for National Defense) turned the work over to the Army Corps of Engineers. Eschewing the Newark model, the Army engineers endeavored to build as many modest airports as possible, in the shortest period of time. By the end of World War II, the initiative built over 500 airstrips coast to coast, at a cost of nearly half a billion dollars.
