ABSTRACT
During the Second World War, Boeing dominated US military aviation. Boeing's work on heavy bombers also paid dividends later and underpinned its ultimate supremacy in the field of large civil jet manufacture. Britain's pioneering entry into the civil jet market was the de Havilland Comet, a jet aircraft of complex and advanced design, which was years ahead of its time. During the Second World War and the early stages of the Cold War, the technological and organizational capabilities of the United States were definitive of its military, economic and political status as a superpower. In the US, tremendous increases in productive capacity were attained during the Second World War. The US aeronautics industry workforce of fewer than 49,000 in 1939 grew to over 2.1 million in 1943. The military situation at the Cold War time had made the development of an indigenous American capacity in jet propulsion imperative, and various US airframe manufacturers were the direct beneficiaries of military crisis.
