ABSTRACT
This chapter concentrates on the development of civil aviation in the United States during the 1930s and explains why that country was more conducive to the emergence of civil aviation than France or the United Kingdom. In the United States, companies founded by James Smith McDonnell, Donald Willis Douglas and William Boeing developed new companies that designed and built new aircraft that made commercial air travel viable for the first time. The successor companies of these men still exist today and are major industrial enterprises.
