For some time aerial mail has been carried from London to Paris in two and a half hours. Mail is also being transported by air route regularly between Washington, Philadelphia, and New York, and between Rome and Turin. Mail was carried through the air from Chicago to New York in ten hours and five minutes; and Second Assistant Postmaster-General Praeger says the sky-line mail will be extended to the Pacific coast, and in the year 1919 fully fifty aero mail routes will be in operation.
How many aeroplanes that might be used for peace purposes were completed by all the Allies and in service of some kind at the end of the war is problematic. Judging by the Allied demand that Germany surrender 1,700 aeroplanes, the Allied military authorities surely estimated that Germany must have had far more than that number in active service on the West Front. Counting the training-machines necessary to teach enough aviators to fly and the planes discarded as unsafe for battle flying, Germany must have had 8,000 or more heavier-than-air machines. The British surely had close to 5,000 of all kinds on the different fronts, with possibly 10,000 used for training and other purposes. Indeed, Britain was making over 4,000 a month, or 50,000 a year, when the war ended, according to the statement made by General Seely in Parliament in April, 1919. Perhaps the French and Italians combined did not have so many as the Germans because of the physical limitations on their manufacturing facilities. The Americans, we know, had nearly 2,000 on the front when the war ended. A thousand De Havilland 4’s had been delivered up to October 4, and more than 6,000 training-machines had also been constructed. We were just getting into a factory production of about 1,200 a month when the war ended. Indeed, to be exact, on November 11, 1918, a total of 33,384 planes had been ordered; subsequent to that date 19,628 ordered were cancelled, and up to December 27, 1918, a total of 13,241 planes had been shipped from United States factories.
With the exception of the training-machines and the two-seater fighters, like the De Havilland 4’s, most of these American machines could hardly be used for anything except aero mail service. The large Caproni and Handley Page bombers will do some passenger carrying. Indeed, the peace planes, unlike the war planes, are constructed with stability, safety, capacity carrying, and comfort as the chief factors.
At the close of the Great War, fortunately for the aeronautic industry, approximately ten billion dollars has already been invested by European, American, and Asiatic countries in aeronautics. Part of this has been expended in constructing aircraft factories, aeronautic engines, aeroplanes, dirigibles, hangars; in obtaining raw materials and landing-fields; in training aviators and mechanics, and in making aeronautic machinery, equipment, and accessories. Thousands of furniture and piano factories, boat-building shops, and similar establishments have been manufacturing propellers, struts, ribs, pontoons, flying-boats, and so on; and hundreds of automobile-makers and engine manufacturers have given over their plants, or a goodly portion of them, to making motors, spars, and tools.
Varnish, linen, cotton, castor-oil, goggles, clothes, and a hundred and one other things have also been used either in the direct manufacture of aircraft or in the equipment of the aviators or mechanics, so that there are to-day tens of thousands of skilled and unskilled artisans, aviators, mechanics, who are wondering how far the aeronautic engine, with its remarkable development from 16 horse-power, which the Wright brothers used, to the 700 horse-power of the Fiat, will be used in commercial aeronautics and how far the frail little Wright glider, which has grown into a machine weighing six tons, can be made a profitable means of aerial transportation.
Moreover, all the scientific knowledge, trained technic, all the enormous investments in fixed property, and the tens of thousands of aircraft built or building is being turned to commercial purposes. They were not, and everything is being done to make the aeroplane do man’s bidding as easily and as readily as the steamboat, electric car, steam-engine, and automobile.
Even though the aeroplane does travel the shortest route in the shortest time between any two given points, before a sufficient number of passengers can be induced to travel via the aerial line to make it financially profitable to the transportation company the public must be assured that it is reasonably safe; that they can fly in comfort; and that the price is reasonable. So let us first see what has been done and what is being done to satisfy those three requisites.
The dangers of aeroplane flight have been grossly exaggerated by newspapers, which record only the unusual. Moreover, flying in the war zone was done under the most adverse and dangerous circumstances. Also the machines were built for manœuvring ability and speed, and not for stability and safety factors. Furthermore, all the scouts and most of the reconnaissance and battle planes were driven by only one motor, so that if engine trouble developed they had to volplane to the ground at the mercy of the antiaircraft guns and the aerial fighters. Finally, they often had to land in shell-scarred terrain. Naturally the casualties were high. Indeed, the war in the air was meant to be as perilous and dangerous as it could be.
Nevertheless, in spite of these hazards it is remarkable how many machines, even when shot down with some vital part out of commission, in many cases falling several thousand feet, have righted themselves before reaching the ground and made a safe landing, due to the precision and accuracy of construction with regard to lateral and longitudinal balance. And all in all, judging from the wonderful records already made by aeroplanes, even the single-motored machine is very reliable.
With the bimotored plane, of course, casualties were not so high, for even if one motor was put out of commission the other could bring the aviators back to the aerodrome. Major Salonone, the Italian ace, on February 20, 1916, flew a hundred miles back to his own lines with one of the motors on his Caproni shot out of commission!