Mass Production

By 1930, about 400,000 people a year were flying on U. S. domestic airlines. Bigger, faster planes were needed to carry more people. Worldwide, passen­ger flights rose to 3 million in 1938.

By the late 1930s, most airplanes were built in factories, yet designs were

still often the work of one person. The British Spitfire fighter of World War II, for example, was the brainchild of designer Reginald J. Mitchell.

When World War II began in Europe in 1939, U. S. factories were turning out just over 2,000 new airplanes a year. U. S. aircraft production rose enormously during the war. From early 1942, U. S. aircraft factories operated twenty-four hours a day, often seven days a week. In 1941, it took 55,000 hours of labor to build a B-17 bomber. In 1944, it took only 19,000 hours, which meant that three planes were being built in about the time it had taken to turn out one. By 1944, U. S. factories were building 96,000 aircraft per year-more than Germany and Japan together.

By the end of the 1940s, high demand from the military and civil sec­tors had changed the face of the aircraft manufacturing industry. The introduc­tion of jet airplanes in the 1940s and 1950s brought a huge increase in civil air
travel, and business boomed again. Space exploration in the 1960s and 1970s coincided with the Cold War, a period of hostility between the West (led by the United States) and communist nations (led by the Soviet Union). Both the space age and the Cold War brought new demands from government cus­tomers. Satellites, spacecraft, rockets, and missiles became important products of the aerospace manufacturing indus­try. Aerospace research and technology grew to keep up with new demands.