airplane Growth of the aviation industryaircraft also called aeroplane or plane

Competition for the airmail routes led to the formation of several large American aviation companies. William Boeing, who during World War I as a lumber producer in Seattle had built planes from Sitka spruce (a wood with fibres of great tensile strength), bid on what came to be called the “Columbia Route” (New York City to California’s San Francisco Bay area), winning the western segment from Chicago to Oakland. Henry Ford, who for several years had been building a trimotor plane (rather similar to the Fokker Trimotor), secured the Cleveland-to-Chicago route. To serve the western section Boeing experimented with new and larger planes built by the Boeing Aircraft Company, which in the following 60 years became the world’s largest and most comprehensive civilian aircraft manufacturer. United Aircraft and Transport joined with National Air Transport (which later became United Airlines) and others to create a second aviation company that secured the contract for the eastern segment of the Columbia Route (from Chicago to New York City) and for the north-south route on the west coast from Vancouver, B.C., to Los Angeles. A further recipient of an airmail contract was the Aviation Corporation (North American and Curtiss aircraft builders), which became American Airlines. The General Motors Corporation held major ownership in Transcontinental Air Transport (T.A.T.) as well as Eastern Transport on the north-south airmail route on the east coast. With Pan American, which was assigned several foreign routes, these aviation companies constituted the “Big Five” airlines, which survived as the dominant U.S. carriers until the 1990s.