Transportation
Growth of the aviation industry.
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.
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