The American Aerospace Industry: From Workshop to Global Enterprise (review)

Readers and researchers interested in the development of the aircraft/aerospace industry in the United States faced a formidable handicap: John B. Rae’s Climb to Greatness: The American Aircraft Industry, 1920–1960 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968) was the last attempt at a historical survey of the industry. Given the industry’s centrality to national development in the twentieth century, the lack of a comprehensive survey can be frustrating for research on a range of other topics and issues as well.

Aerospace does not easily lend itself to the historical overview illuminating other major industries. Unfortunately, few aerospace firms preserve or provide access to the kinds of records that enable historians to prepare monographs. The industry’s real problem for the survey writer, however, is its scale and complexity. Aerospace is less an industry than a protean multiplex of technological, economic, political, and cultural processes. It is a panoply of private and public institutions that range from design and manufacturing firms to the armed services’ air wings; from parts and accessory suppliers to government research, support, promotional, and regulatory bodies; from airlines, trade associations, lobbies, and unions to congressional representatives and committees. Besides the archival impairment of private firms, the research base for aerospace history is enormous, far-flung, and altogether daunting for any historian. The problems are only compounded by the historian’s usual limitations from the engineer’s perspective. Aerospace history has also been constrained by lingering, tired assumptions of the “military-industrial complex” school.

Roger Bilstein’s study is thus a most welcome addition to the literature. His well-written overview supersedes Rae’s sound but dated Climb to Greatness. Not pretending to provide a “comprehensive, definitive survey,” Bilstein instead offers “a framework that imparts a sense of the general context and evolution of a very complex industry” (pp. xiii–xiv). Compressing his years of research on aerospace and its multiple implications for the American experience, the author meets his goal. He sketches military aviation, air transport, rocketry and space flight, personal aircraft, helicopters, and general aviation, as well as engines, accessories, avionics, and infrastructure from the Wright brothers’ first flight in 1903 to the industry’s growing consolidation and global reach in the early 1990s.

While Bilstein generally uses broad brush strokes, he focuses briefly and concisely on various issues and topics. A selection: the patent disputes among early aircraft innovators and the formative context of federally enforced competition for military aircraft; the Curtiss-Wright Corporation; the development of the Boeing B-17 bomber and long-range transport (model 247) during the Great Depression; the Douglas-Commercial-3; the North American P-51 Mustang; labor strife during the 1930s and 1940s; the F-86 Saber and B-52 Stratofortress; and the work of NASA, the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, and the Federal Aviation Administration. Bilstein describes international influences and competition and much else besides. Other specific topics include naval aviation, Sidewinder missiles, Cessna private planes, the F-4 Phantom, the Minuteman, Apollo, the Boeing 700 series of airliners up to the 777, the F-16 Falcon, Bell Ranger helicopters, the B-2 Stealth, Desert Storm, and the F-22 Raptor. Bilstein is especially thought-provoking on the various multiplier effects, cross-fertilizations, spin-offs, and technology transfers prompted by aerospace in other industrial and institutional realms. Students will be hard-pressed to find clearer and better-contextualized summaries of such basic developments as jet, swept-wing, and microcircuit technologies; new systems management techniques prompted by aerospace; and the various military procurement reforms from the Air Corps Act (1926) to the Packard Commission (1986).

Bilstein is too sanguine on the industry’s performance during World War II and fails to conclude with a clear summary of the industry’s place in national and global economies. The index is too brief, hindering quick reference. The Tonkin Gulf Resolution is misplaced in the summer of 1965 (p. 168). Nevertheless...