airplane Aviation goes commercialaircraft also called aeroplane or plane

With practical planes in hand in 1918 the organization of an airline to operate these craft on a scheduled basis over a consistent route was attempted. The first airline was formed in Germany; the Deutsche Luftreederie began service from Berlin to Leipzig and Weimar on Feb. 5, 1919, followed only three days later by the French Farman Company on the trans-channel crossing from Paris to London using a converted Goliath bomber. In August 1919, the first daily service was established on this route from Le Bourget to Hounslow. The oldest surviving airline, KLM, was organized in The Netherlands in 1919 and jointly with a British company began flying the Amsterdam-London route the following year. Outside Europe, the Queensland and Northern Territories Aerial Services, Ltd. (Qantas) was founded in 1920; it eventually became the Australian national airline.

Most of the airlines founded in the 1920s and ’30s were created at least in part to encourage the purchase of aircraft of domestic manufacture; but the privately owned Swissair was the first European airline to purchase American aircraft. The intertwining of domestic aircraft manufacture and national airline operation was widely advocated as critical to national defense. In the United States airline pioneers were private operators, as were the aircraft builders, and there was no national policy concerning either operation. Throughout the 1920s there were no adequately financed airlines, and most lasted for only short periods before failing or merging. Given the large area of the United States, an airline with routes of national or even regional coverage was the exception. And it was only in the late 1920s that any thought was given to the question of encouraging a domestic aircraft industry or the promotion of domestic airline companies.

A second factor, especially in Europe, was the colonial airline. Britain, France, The Netherlands, and Germany all developed colonial airlines, with Belgium, Italy, and the United States joining the operation less extensively. Routes for national airlines were limited to destinations within a country or its possessions, except by agreement. The extensive colonial empires still in existence in the 1920s and ’30s became natural sites for extended airlines. Britain, for example, created Imperial Airways by first using bilateral agreements with other European countries to reach the Mediterranean and, once there, to project a continuation based on British colonies and protectorates in Malta, Cyprus, Palestine, Trans-Jordan, the Iraq and Persian Gulf protectorates, India, Burma, the Malay Protectorate, Australia, and New Zealand. China, Central Africa, and South Africa could be reached by other routes. Only the North Atlantic and the northern Pacific resisted a “British” national airline. France shaped a colonial airline from Provence across the Mediterranean to Algeria, the French Sahara, French Equatorial Africa, and Madagascar. Working out landing rights between Belgium and France provided a route to the Belgian Congo. The Netherlands, again through trades with Britain, shaped a colonial route for KLM to the Dutch East Indies.

In the 1930s these colonial routes were the main long-distance air routes available not only because a far-flung empire simplified the problem of securing landing rights but also because the operating “stage”—that is, the maximum distance that might be flown without stopping to refuel—was then only about 500 miles. The Pacific and the Atlantic were the major “water jumps” that remained unconquered by civil aircraft in 1930. The American air routes showed the way to the solution. Pan American Airlines was first organized to fly from Miami to Key West in Florida and to Havana and by the 1930s from Brownsville, Texas, to Mexico City and Panama. Pan American founder Juan Trippe advocated the concept of the “chosen instrument”—international connections for the United States should be provided by a single American company flying only outside the country. The American “empire” in this sense was Latin America, where American investment was extensive but political control was only indirect. Germany, which after World War I lost its empire, similarly turned to South America, particularly Colombia, to shape an extensive system of air routes. In the American case, Pan American’s ultimately extensive route structure in the Caribbean, on the east coast of South America, and in Central America provided experience in operating a long-distance international airline.

By the early 1930s three airlines in particular were seeking to develop world-scale route patterns—Pan American, Imperial Airways, and KLM. Such a development called for a set of aircraft that were entirely new in concept from those that had been derived from the planes of World War I. Specifically, what was needed were seaplanes, which offered some of the advantages that the Zeppelin company, Delag, had obtained with their dirigibles. They could fly stages of considerably greater length than could be flown with standard land planes because the sea-based plane enjoyed an almost infinite takeoff runway, that of a long stretch of water in a sheltered embayment. Several miles might be used at a time when a 1,000-foot airport runway was the norm. Long runways, either on land or on water, meant that planes could be quite large, use multiple engines, have large enough fuel tanks to fly an extended stage, and require less strength in the undercarriage.

The tradition of high-powered planes introduced between 1907 and 1909 by Glen Curtiss continued. In addition to the Curtiss company, Martin and Sikorsky each produced large four-engine seaplanes with the potential for stages of more than 500 miles. Because of its size, the United States showed a concern for lengthening the stage even of land-based planes. When Pan American adopted the seaplane in the early 1930s, the Sikorsky S-42 flying boat had four engines that permitted it to fly to Buenos Aires, Arg., by making a series of water crossings between Puerto Rico and the Río de la Plata.

After World War I, another factor contributed to airline development: the desire for an air service to speed up the mails. Unlike Europe, where the nationalized airlines carried the mail, in the United States the Army Air Corps was assigned the job, with generally dreary results. The problems of flying in a country the size of the United States were considerable. Particularly in the East, with the broad band of the Appalachians lying athwart the main routes, bad flying conditions were endemic and crashes were frequent. The introduction of aircraft beacons helped, but the low altitudes at which most contemporary planes could operate continued to plague service. Commercial flying began in earnest in 1925 when, under the Kelly Act, the United States Post Office Department established contracts for carrying mail over assigned routes. Payments were made in return for the weight of mail carried. This practice often gave earnings that made the difference between marginal operation and flying at outright losses. Later, the method of airmail payments was revised; instead of paying for the weight of mail carried, the Post Office paid instead for the space reserved for airmail were it to be offered to the airline company to transport. The result was an incentive to the companies to increase the size of the planes they normally flew.