History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.
Five years ago yesterday, like so many others I watched in horror and confusion as the September 11 attacks unfolded on the other side of the planet and on my TV screen. It seemed so novel and so strange, to think of humble airliners being used as weapons. (I still catch myself looking up at the sky when I hear one flying low, and wondering for a second -- 'Is it going to ... ?') But it wasn't really all that novel. Airliners and terror go way back.
However, it wasn't that people were worried that airliners in flight would be seized by terrorists and flown into important buildings. Instead, the fear was that a nation's airliners could be quickly and easily turned into bombers and used en masse to deliver a knock-out blow against an unsuspecting victim. In the 1920s and early 1930s, this idea was very widespread in Britain, at least among those people who were thinking about how to win, or better yet, prevent the next war.
The basic idea was that a bomber and an airliner or air transport are fundamentally similar: they are both big, heavy aircraft designed to carry a large payload over a long distance. In fact, early airliners were often just war-surplus bombers; conversely, some bombers had civilian origins (such as the Handley Page Hyderabad, developed from the H-P W.8). Strap on some external bomb racks, fit a bombsight and maybe a machine gun or two to ward off enemy fighters, and you have a useful military machine. P. R. C. Groves was the first to sound the tocsin, in 1922:
An aeroplane which can carry a certain number of passengers a certain distance at a certain speed is capable of carrying an equivalent weight in bombs for the same distance at the same speed; and any passenger-carrier which is efficient as such can be transformed into an efficient bomber.1
Groves continued to fill many column-inches of newsprint with his warnings about the danger of civil-military conversion, and he was followed in this by many writers; Liddell Hart was still discussing the possibility in his The Defence of Britain, written in mid-1939. But why was it considered such a problem? Three reasons.
First was the idea that there was little or no defence against bombers, that they could not be stopped, and that the destruction that they would wreak upon a city like London would be catastrophic. The more bombers there were, the more casaulties there would be.
The second reason was that it added a big element of uncertainly into calculations of national airpower. In a matter of days or even hours, an aggressor could add hundreds of bombers to its air force. What was formerly a manageable threat could become an existential one almost overnight.
The final, and most important, reason was Germany. Groves had recently been in involved in the monitoring of German aerial disarmament, as mandated by the Versailles treaty -- it was forbidden from possessing any military aircraft whatsoever. But he believed that the booming German civil aviation industry was in part a front for a covert military program, which was laying the basis for a future air force. German airlines came to dominate central European routes and German aircraft were much in demand overseas. And Britain was falling behind: in 1928, the number of air-miles flown by British airliners was less than a third of those flown by German ones, according to the responsible British minister, Samuel Hoare.2 So, even though it had been disarmed in the air in theory, in practice Germany was still a threat.
But when the next war came, neither the Germans nor anybody else added clouds of airliner-bombers to their aerial fleets. Why not? There are several reasons, but the main one was probably capitalism. Airlines have to make a profit, so they like fuel-efficient and cost-effective aircraft. These are secondary considerations for air forces (or at least are judged by different criteria): they want bombers which can get in to a target area and out again as fast as possible. These goals were incompatible: flying fast is not, generally speaking, cost-effective (one reason why Concorde is no more). With the occasional exception (such as the surprisingly fast times of the Douglas DC-2 and the Boeing 247 in the 1934 MacRobertson Air Race), by the late 1930s airliners literally couldn't keep up with military aircraft, and would simply have been target practice for fighter pilots.3
So much for that idea then. But there was one important consequence of this somewhat overdrawn fear. In 1932, the long-awaited Disarmament Conference opened in Geneva. One item on its ambitious agenda was clipping the bomber's wings, and the obvious way to do this was to ban it altogether. The problem was, of course, that even if every country in the world destroyed their bombers, then they might end up at the mercy of an unscrupulous nation with a big civilian air fleet. Various solutions were contemplated, such as placing either military aviation or civil aviation, or both, under some form of international control. But no agreement could be reached (Britain, for one, was too attached to its use of bombers for Imperial 'policing') and so the opportunity was missed. If it had been seized, would it have prevented Guernica, Rotterdam, Dresden -- Hiroshima? Or would it have given expansionist countries a free hand? Would Britons have felt more secure, or less? Would appeasement have ended sooner, or later, or never have happened at all? The shadow of the airliner lies over the past, as it once darkened the future.
The Times, 22 March 1922, p. 14.
There is of course a critique of British aviation and industrial policy at work here; Groves believed that the government should subsidise British civil aviation, just as the Continental countries did.
The Luftwaffe did use Ju 52 transports as bombers in Spain and Poland, but these were not impressed from civilian life.
Well, in practice, there were more dimensions of variation than there were aircraft manufacturers, so I don't think you can prove anything at quite that level about the differences between civil and military aircraft. For example, civilian airlines tended to require banking accommodation. Air forces did not. They spent money "as if they were printing it," which was of course the exact truth. In his autobiography, Eddie Rickenbacker, who was chief of Eastern Airlines, gives an account of negotiating with Boeing and Douglas for jet airliners. He wanted noise suppressors, and thrust reversers, and interest on his deposit. Boeing took the position that they did not need instruction in aircraft design, and refused financial accommodation point-blank. Classic Rolls-Royce salesman, in short. Douglas agreed about the financial accommodation, and promised a serious effort on the technical issues (Edward V. Rickenbacker,. _Rickenbacker: His Own Story_, 1967, ch. 19 (pp. 440-41, pbk. edn.). Some of the most important differences between military and civilian work have to do with this kind of thing.
I've been looking at James Hay Stevens, _The Shape of the Airplane_ (1953?), and I note that the one characteristic of a good bomber which he emphasizes is a large unobstructed bomb bay, as exemplified by the Avro Lancaster. The designers of other bombers tended to figure out what was the largest bomb they would want to handle, and then break the bomb bay down into compartments of that size, in the interests of structural strength. This is a long way from the core of an aircraft design of that date, which would be the wings and the engines, and of course aircraft engines are essentially interchangeable, like automobile tires. Airplanes were periodically being refitted with new engines, eventually going turboprop. I think you would need to show some evidence of distinctive design tendencies in bomber wings vis-a-vis airliner wings.
I ran across a couple of interesting references on Slashdot a while back. The gist of then was that one of the risks of employing ex-military Information Technology people is that they are very sloppy about complying with software licensing terms. They tend to take the attitude that "it all belongs to Mr. Rumsfeld anyway, and if anyone wants to argue, we've got some really impressive guards with submachine guns and attack dogs. The dogs eat a bailiff or process server, and an hour later, they're hungry again." In a civilian business, that is an excellent formula for expensive legal difficulties.
About the Channel Tunnel, the big point to remember is that the invasion panic was a showstopper. It blocked the tunnel for a hundred years, by the end of which time both the British and French empires had collapsed, and both countries had an inferiority complex about the United States, the Soviet Union, Japan, and who knows what else? Projects of that sort cannot go forward without sustained support at both ends. In any event, civil engineering projects are not mobile in the same sense as airliners. Suppose that Britain had put a lot of money into subsidizing an airline in Canada, operating between, say, Montreal and Vancouver on the Pacific coast. This would not have been an entirely unreasonable thing. The government of Canada does periodically worry about regions becoming assimilated to the adjoining portions of the United States, and takes measures to bind Canada more closely together. However, European powers would have done sums in their heads about how fast the airplanes could be flown across the Atlantic. Better and faster railroads would not have had that kind of potential.
Brett Holman -
9/26/2006
Thanks, I think see where you are coming from now. I suspect I did not express
myself very clearly.
Certainly bomber and airliner design diverged dramatically from the 1960s.
Nobody today thinks you can turn a 747 into an ersatz B-1. Conversely, bombers
and airliners were much closer together in terms of design philosophy
before the Second World War. I am not arguing that there was <em>no</em>
similarity between bombers and airliners -- my post did attempt to explain
that there was a great deal of similiarity -- but I <em>am</em> arguing that
there was enough of a difference to make the latter militarily inefficient
(and by 1939, ineffective). The generally fairly sorry record of
civil-military crossovers is hard to ignore on this point, along with
the evident preference for specialised bomber designs. How else to explain
this, other than the difference in roles between bombers and airliners, relatively small though it may be?
To put it another way, today's airliners would only make third-rate
bombers (at best!) Those of the 1930s would have performed better,
but they would still only have been second-rate bombers. Whatever
the explanation for the differences between bombers and airliners,
it obviously had <em>something</em> to do with the purposes they were
designed for. And it was evidently enough to make the idea of conversion
untenable.
I also disagree that I'm importing 'a set of assumptions about what
airspeed means which are generally accepted at present, but which were
not generally accepted in 1935' -- for the simple fact that the post-WWII
era in aviation is not my field of study, and I don't know all that much
about it! (One way to avoid presentism :) Rather, my understanding comes
from the primary sources. I can quote you any number of British books from
the 1920s and 1930s on airpower which assert the primacy of speed for bombers.
Conversely, speed was stressed less for airliners. Again, I am not arguing
that civilian airliners were designed to be slow, nor that there were no fast civilian aircraft. Just that in general, they did not <em>need</em> to go
that extra mile-per-hour, as their military counterparts did.
On the Channel Tunnel: indeed, Francophobia (and in the 20th century,
Germanophobia) played a key role in the controversy. Just as
Germanophobia was implicated in the pre-1914 airship panics -- which
didn't prevent air attack from becoming a real danger shortly afterwards.
As you say, the fact that the threat was a phantom one was immaterial;
the average person can't be blamed for taking fright at the idea when
supposed experts were constantly warning them of the danger. But this is
why I question whether there can be a purely pacifist transportation
policy -- certainly it can be pacifist in intent, but there will always
be somebody who perceives it differently. Any means of bringing people
closer together is a good thing in principle, but it's always possible
that they will then start trying to kill each other ...
Andrew D. Todd -
9/23/2006
A further sidenote:
On American domestic routes, of, say, five hundred miles, jet airliners frequently do not achieve more than 100-200 mph average speed, once one has counted in such incidentals as retrieving one's luggage from baggage claim, time waiting for connections, etc. I think my record for slow air travel was a Beech 1900 propjet operating over a seventy-mile leg, which achieved only thirty-five miles per hour. Upon later inquiry, I discovered that the local taxicab company made quite a good thing out of substituting for the propjet when it was unserviceable. Getting an airplane into the air is intrinsically a bit of a production, and this has to be offset against the airplane's flying speed.
The great strength of the passenger train is that it is very good at rapidly starting and stopping, and rapidly loading and unloading. It is commonplace for a crack express train to have stops every fifty miles or so, because that can be done without cutting into the average speed significantly. If you game out travel times between secondary cities (let us say, Rouen, in France, and Magdeburg, in Germany), using regularly scheduled routes, you will probably find that the train can keep up with the airplane as long as the train's peak speed is, say, half or even a third of that of the airplane. It is difficult for an airplane to plug into the railnet at the same level that a train can plug in. The common practice is for the local train and the express train to stop on different sides of the same platform. Likewise, a train stops in the heart of a big city, whereas airports are necessarily selected for their remote locations. That said, the pragmatic argument for air travel in the 1930's seems something of a stretch. There was probably more of symbolism in it, barring the special case of overwater flight.
I understand that where discount airlines such as RyanAir do well in Europe at present is in catering to people who want to go a long way, typically North Europeans who want to get away from the winter. That implies not only a long distance, a couple of thousand miles, but an indifference to destination. The tour organizer can say, in effect, that all sun-tourists from Hamburg, in Germany, will go to Greece, and all sun-tourists from Manchester, in England, will go to Sicily. This means that the tour organizer does not have to monkey around with the logistics of connecting flights, the way an airline catering to business travelers does.
Andrew D. Todd -
9/22/2006
Let me try to explain what I mean by "airspeed presentism." It is the importation of a set of assumptions about what airspeed means which are generally accepted at present, but which were not generally accepted in 1935.
Of course, a fighter is a specialized type, and was so at the time of the Second World War. However, the case for the bomber is considerably more ambiguous. Given the rate of change in the 1930's and 1940's, small differences in design objectives tended to overtaken by other factors, such as the extent to which a given aircraft designer was comfortable experimenting with untested technology. Both a heavy bomber and an airliner were designed around the assumption that the way to improve performance was: first, make the runway longer; next, make the wing smaller, proportionately increasing both the stall speed and the maximum speed obtainable with a given engine; finally, reach for the stratosphere, in search of thinner air and lower drag, and getting up above the uncertain weather as well. This approximately corresponds to Edward Constant's "turbojet as paradigm-shift" argument, though one might add that the turbocharger constituted a turbojet on the installment plan, as it were. There was also another aspect, that of "chameleonizing" the airplane, with better flaps, variable-pitch propellers, etc., so that it could perform well at both high speeds and low speeds. The end result of this strategy was the B-47 with the notorious "coffin corner," in its flight envelope, where the airplane was caught between its stall speed and the speed of sound. There was an answer within the "paradigm shift" logic-- design the airplane to go supersonic, and proceed up to Mach.2 and 60,000 feet (the Concorde, with titanium leading edges), or Mach 3 and 80,000 feet (The XB-70, with all-titanium construction). The swing-wing was the acme of chameleonization. In the logic of paradigm shift, speed was not so much a cost as a free lunch. This idea is rather akin to Moore's Law in electronics. Can you tell me, for example, what a military microprocessor looks like?
However, at this point of aircraft development, in the late 1960's, the Sonic Boom debate broke out. It was made clear that one could not get away with flying an airliner at Mach 3 over populated areas, and laying down a sonic boom. At that point, bombers began to diverge from airliners, as different classes of designers sought different solutions to the limitations imposed by the sound barrier. The new kind of airliner was a "wide-body" jet with high-bypass turbofans, designed primarily for economy of operation at limited speed, and comparatively modest altitudes of 20,000 feet or so. The Europeans got to the heart of the matter when they called their entry the Airbus. A parallel process was happening in the military, mostly having to do with escaping missiles. The B-1 and B-2 Bombers really are distinctive aircraft, compared to the Boeing 747 or the Airbus, as well as compared to each other. The B-1 is designed to go in at about five hundred feet, flying below the radar. It has adopted a strategy which the airliner designer would not even consider following. And as for the notion of a "stealth" airliner-- the imagination boggles. It is this kind of order of difference which separates present notions of aircraft design from those of the 1930's.
About popular reaction to the Channel Tunnel in the nineteenth century, Willy Ley made the point in his _Engineers' Dreams_ (1954) that this was very much an exercise in Francophobia. In any case, the tunnel did not get built in the 1880's. France could not build it unilaterally. It is not important whether English objections were well-founded. What is important is that the project got deep-sixed until England was ready for it. Of course railroads have military uses (see Pratt, Showalter, below), but at the same time, these uses have limitations. Certainly, building a railroad de novo is likely to be an involved proposition,
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Edwin A. Pratt, _The Rise of Rail Power in War and Conquest, 1833-1914_, P. S. King & Son, Ltd., London, 1915
Old reading note follows:
A fairly practical book, oriented towards how to use railroads for military purposes, illustrated with examples from the wars of the nineteenth century. This is military history rather than history of war.
While there is a brief consideration of armored trains, the military uses of railroads are mostly logistic. Railroads can transport troops, either in short flanking movements, or in long strategic ones. They make it possible for the whole economic power of the home country to be brought to bear in the form of supplies, and permit the rapid removal of sick, wounded, and P.O.W.s, who would otherwise hamper the army's mobility.
Pratt lays stress on the importance of developing a combined army-railroad staff. The soldiers have to set priorities, but they have no idea how to run a railroad. Railroaders are, of course, the opposite.
Railroad troops have to provided, to repair and destroy track at need, and also to operate trains in enemy territory. They can only be raised and trained, in practice, with the collaboration of the civil railroads.
As far as the conduct of operations, Pratt emphasizes first that the railroads must be centrally controlled, to prevent individual commanders from disrupting their operations. At least in the early days of the American civil war, low grade functionaries would do stupid things (he gives the example of the paymaster who set up shop in a boxcar, ignoring the fact that he was thus blocking the main line). More seriously, commanders tended to view cars as mobile magazines, much like the earlier commissariat wagons, despite their greater value and scarcity. To add to this, supply officers at the rear will naturally incline to send off everything they can as soon as possible. Between them, they can easily throw the forward railhead into gridlock, and create an acute shortage of rolling stock elsewhere in the system.
To prevent this, a rear base must be set up, far enough back to be clear of the fighting, with associated depots. This is the boundary between the civilian railroads and the military railroad. All shipments are stopped here, unloaded, sorted out,
and the cars returned to the civilian system. It is important to have the manpower to do so immediately. From here, supplies are dispatched rapidly forward on an as needed basis.
There may have to be an intermediate base further forward, especially for the keeping of a reserve of ammunition, loaded in cars. This will be the furthest point to which there is regular service, which is to say it will be just far enough back to be temporarily immune to the operations of the enemy. Forward of this is an extent of insecure line to the railhead, which is
constantly shifting, according to the fortunes of war. Nothing is allowed to accumulate here. Trained come forward with stores for immediate use, are rapidly unloaded, and withdraw immediately.
Still further forward are the railroad troops, repairing or wrecking the line as the case may be. In the pursuit, they are expected to keep up with the advance guard.
In dealing with the planning of railroads for military purposes, Pratt attempts, not wholly successfully, to construct a distinction between ordinary railroads, for economic ends, and strategic ones. The characteristic traits of a strategic railroad system are a lot of lines running to the border, for mobilization, and a lot of lines running along the border, for
flanking movement.
Finally, he interprets German railroading in Africa and the near east as a central part of a prewar scheme to overthrow the British Empire.
--------------------------------------------------------
Dennis E. Showalter, _Railroads and Rifles: Soldiers, Technology, and the Unification of Germany_, Archon books, Hamden, Connecticut, 1975
William A. Shurcliff, _S/S/T and Sonic Boom Handbook_, 1970
Brett Holman -
9/22/2006
Thanks for your very insightful, and stimulating, comment, Andrew! Sorry
for not replying sooner.
Firstly, your points about the importance of production capacity and the importance of senior pilots are quite true -- for the war that was actually fought. But the whole point about the knock-out blow paradigm was that the next war would be fought and won in a matter of weeks or days, or even hours. In such a scenario, the key consideration was to have as big an air force as possible at the start of the war. Reserves were important for replacing initial losses, but it was generally thought (ie by those who subscribed to the paradigm) that production of new aircraft and training of new pilots would take too long to have any effect on the outcome of the war. (Such a short war also meant that
the logistical nightmare induced by assimilating dozens of different civilian
aircraft types into an air force would not be a problem for long.) In hindsight,
I really should have mentioned this in my post!
I don't discount the possibility that German air transports might have played a bigger role in bombing, had war started much earlier. However, I think it would have been a mark of desperation, not deception -- a defensive strategy, not ann offensive one. I'm not an expert on the Luftwaffe, but I haven't read that it was particularly relying upon the conversion of civilian transports to bombers in time of war. In fact, in 1933 the head of Lufthansa (Knauss) submitted a proposal for laying the foundations of the Luftwaffe to the head of the air ministry (Milch, the former Lufthansa head); he envisaged building a risk air fleet of heavy bombers to deter attack, instead of (for example) calling for more dual-use planes for Lufthansa. This is pretty much the opposite of the airliner strategy. But it's not my area, so I could be wrong.
About speed: I certainly did not mean to imply that civilian aircraft were designed to be slow. Certainly airlines would want the fastest aircraft they could get, but this was only one consideration among many, including purchase costs, running costs, reliability, ease of maintenance, passenger capacity, and so on, and I would say not the most of important of these. (I'd say you are right to suggest airlines were competing with railways, but in terms of speed there was no competition at all. Rail speeds of a hundred miles an hour or more were attained only rarely, and were not sustained over the length of a commercial service: the record average speed for a commercial rail service was set in Germany in 1933, and was only 77 mph. The cruise speed for a contemporary airliner, the Boeing 247, was 189 mph! My guess is that the competition was based on other factors -- comfort, safety, convenience, familiarity, volume.) My point, perhaps not clearly expressed, is the military need for speed was much greater, and they were more willing to compromise on other considerations in order to achieve it. (Again, it's a trade-off situation: I'm not suggesting that, for example, reliability was not a concern.) Perhaps military aircraft are judged on their peak performance, and civilian ones on their average performance?
I think you're right about fuel economy, however. I should at least have labelled that speculation. But I would still argue that it comes down to economics in the end, in one form or another. Even if you are burning up venture capital to survive, a more cost-efficient fleet will burn up that money at a slower rate and so keep the wolves at bay for a little longer. Even with subsidies, the cheaper you can fly, the more of that subsidy you get to keep as profit. All else being equal, there is still an incentive to cut costs. If not in fuel economy, then something else -- ease of maintenance, perhaps. As you say, pilots would often repair their own engines. So having the latest supercharged high-horsepower engines would not necessarily be desirable, if it were harder to maintain. But this was not such a problem for an air force (though certainly it was preferable that aircraft intended for imperial 'policing' be relatively simple and robust).
On airspeed presentism: I don't really understand your point. Sure, approaching the sound barrier forces hard design choices. But it's hardly the case that there were no difficult choices to be made at subsonic speeds. Otherwise, there'd be no difference between a Spitfire and a Lysander. Or between
a Lancaster and a Brabazon. And those minor improvements you mention cumulatively had a large effect: the 1930s saw a huge leap in performance, as
you can see here (for speed), including, at last, a marked superiority for fighters over bombers.
The function of an aircraft dictates its design, and bombers and transports do not, after all, have identical roles. In the end, there must be a reason why
aircraft designers and air forces generally preferred specialised designs
for them, rather than multi-purpose large aircraft. And while there were certainly examples of the latter, it's hard to think of many which excelled at both roles. A few decent light bombers like the Hudson, for example, had their
origins in civilian aircraft, but no mediums or heavies. Conversely, bomber conversions to air transports tended to be indifferent at best. The B-29 is perhaps a good example of this -- you consider how it might have performed as an airliner. In fact, it was turned into an airliner, the Boeing 377. They had to add a bulbous superstructure onto it for the passenger deck (the lower deck featured a cocktail bar!) Apparently, it was a popular plane to fly in, but the aircraft itself was expensive and complex, and only some 50-odd were built. Compare that with the contemporary Constellation -- designed from the start to carry passengers and not bombs -- of which over 800 were built (though that includes military orders as well).
Finally, your observations about a pacifist transportation policy are very
interesting. I wonder if it's ever possible to have a purely pacifist transportation policy, though? I'm thinking here of the Channel Tunnel, which was proposed over a century before it was actually built -- and was immediately seized upon as a threat to Britain's security, with novels, articles, letters to the editor, etc denouncing the idea or debating proposals to defend against the possibility of an enemy country using it to pour troops into the country without the Royal Navy being able to do anything about it. (One idea I came across was to build caissons into it, which could be flooded if necessary.) And bridges, of course, are one of the first things to be blown up by defenders in danger of being overrun. Humans being what they are, they'll always find a way to beat ploughshares into swords, eventually.
Andrew D. Todd -
9/15/2006
I take it you will have read Nevil Shute's _Slide Rule_. One thing you have to remember is that in the 1930's aircraft were going through a phenomenal rate of technological change, and it was practically impossible to accumulate air power in being, as distinct from production capacity. Shute's experience as managing director of Airspeed was that he could scarcely get a model into production before it became obsolete, and he was having constant battles with the auditors about the valuation of inventory, or of airplanes which had been sold on credit. The situation was rather like the Silicon Valley, circa 2000 AD. Of course, once the war started, airplanes got shot down so fast that, again, what counted was the ability to produce new ones. Once the war started, the aircraft factories went to a system of a few craftsmen directing the work of many young women. What was important was the skill level of these few craftsmen, especially as expressed in teaching ability. Likewise, building aircraft would have resulted in an accumulation of key manufacturing tools. Similarly, on the operations side, one of the scarcest resources was senior pilots, who could become flight instructors or squadron leaders, training schoolboys as combat pilots. In the period before re-armament, the airlines had pilots flying in very remote and difficult areas, eg. South America, Canada, etc. Crossing the Andes was probably about the most demanding flying there was in the 1930's, mostly on account of the extreme altitude (ridgelines above 18,000 ft, passes above 10,000). Almost any reasonable aviation program had substantial military implications. What mattered was human capital.
As it happened, Germany got in a few years of re-armament before the war started, and did not build a new generation of transports because it was too busy building fighters and bombers. However, if the beginning of re-armament had precipitated a war, then of course the transport aircraft would have been much newer, more competitive, and would have played a larger role.
It is a mistake to assume that airlines were operating upon motives of economy. They were results-oriented, but that is not by any means the same thing. The one instance I know of where a comparatively large civilian passenger airplane was intentionally designed away from high speed would be a couple of airplanes which Airspeed built for Sir Alan Cobham, the airshow entrepreneur, circa 1930. These were designed for "joyriding," that is, taking large numbers of passengers on short flights from rough fields, as a kind of taste of the future. The point was not to go anywhere, but simply to take off, make a loop, and land. An actual airline, however, had to face the stiff competition of the railroads in their heyday. A well-run railroad could run its crack express trains at a hundred miles an hour, using the fast lane of four-track lines. The practical economic question for civil aviation, and this runs through many of Shute's books, was, could you get the airplane on the "never-never," or did you have to pay for it in real money? I doubt fuel consumption per se would have been a major issue. Even engine maintenance was likely to be performed by pilots. Alternatively, vide Ernest K. Gann, profitability in servicing subsidized air-mail contracts was very often a matter of chutzpah in air-mailing telephone books to oneself. Airlines were not commercial business in the ordinary sense of the word, so much as they were extensions of governments. From what I can tell, temporarily viable airline routes were usually overwater, where the effective competition was a ship. Shute's experience was that even many of these eventually went bankrupt when the venture capital ran out, but that the creditors made themselves whole by selling the airplanes to one side or the other in the Spanish Civil War.
I think you may be falling into the error of "airspeed presentism." The basic fact about airplanes in the 1930's was that their airspeed was half of the speed of sound, or less. The speed of sound is a major discontinuity, and its side effects reach down to 500 mph (say mach 0.8 at altitude). After 1950, aircraft design began to be governed by concerns about whether airflows around the airframe might become supersonic, and this tended to force hard design choices. In the 1930's design was mostly about adopting improvements which are obvious in hindsight: retractable landing gear, flaps, variable-pitch propellers, engine turbochargers, etc.
The B-29 is something like the definitive outcome of aircraft development in the 1930's. I made some rough-and-ready estimates of its fuel consumption if used as an airliner (say, 50 seats), and the figure I came up with is about 40 passenger-miles per gallon. In short, we are talking about approximately the same range as a private automobile, and this would have been for a luxury service. This would have to be gone into, but I think you would find that airfares were at least ten times the cost of fuel. It was not until the really advanced aircraft of the 1970's that everything else got cheap enough to make fuel costs significant. The cost of building and maintaining an aircraft is only weakly dependent on its size, and it took jumbo jets to compete economically with Greyhound.
I think, more fundamentally, that we can talk about what a pacifist transportation policy looks like. After its disastrous experiences in the Second World War, Japan abjured militarism, but, once it was back on its feet, Japan built the Tokaido railroad line, and the Seikan Tunnel. Similarly, the political unification of Europe has unleashed a series of ambitious tunnel and bridge projects: viz, the Channel Tunnel, the St. Gotthard Base Tunnel (in progress), and the Baltic bridge/tunnel projects. There is almost a difference in philosophy, between building a really good road, versus building a machine which can go anywhere without a road.
