America's Airports: Airfield Development, 1918-1947 (review)

The central question that Janet Bednarek seeks to answer in America's Airports is, "Why municipal airports?" (p. 3). Cities own the majority of the United States' primary commercial airports, and her goal is to explain how and why cities became airports' primary custodians. Earlier studies of airport history have relied upon the 1926 Air Commerce Act's ban on federal dollars for airport improvements as sufficient explanation of this seeming oddity. But the act did not specify who should own and operate airports, and thus the evolution of airports' relationships to cities is Bednarek's subject.

The book's first two chapters trace the relationship between airports, cities, and the two federal organizations that wished to make the airplane into something useful in the 1920s, the Army Air Service and the Post Office. The Air Service and Post Office recognized the need for a national network of airports but lacked the funding, and therefore they pressured cities to build for them. The results were mixed. Many cities were not interested, many lacked funds, some were interested but were hampered by state laws. But others did built airports for themselves, and a few allowed private companies to build and operate "municipal" fields for them. When Charles Lindbergh's 1927 flight sparked a major surge in airport construction, there was still no set pattern for responsibility.

The onset of the Great Depression ended the short boom in municipally funded airport construction, and between 1932 and 1938 federal relief projects simultaneously provided new funds for construction and limited that aid to publicly owned airports. This served to reinforce the idea that airports should be public responsibilities while also acknowledging the unhappy reality that airports had proven both expensive and unprofitable. At the same time, technological requirements for airports were expanding. "Modern" airports needed hard-surfaced runways, lighting, and radio and firefighting equipment, all of which cost money cities did not have. In 1938, when Congress adopted legislation to replace the 1926 act, city leaders successfully lobbied to get the legal ban on federal airport aid dropped.

Money still did not flow until U.S. entry into World War II, but the war cemented a pattern that was made a matter of legislation in the 1946 Federal Airport Act, which lasted through the 1970s. Major commercial airports were henceforth locally owned, but received very substantial federal aid.

Bednarek's book is primarily synthetic, placing between one set of covers information that historians would otherwise have to seek in scattered publications. It leaves open questions about airport location, land use in airport environs, local reactions to airport siting decisions, and the evolution of regional airport authorities, but these were not intended to be the focus. The book is a useful introduction to the complex subject of airport development, and it represents a good point of departure for historians interested in these other questions.