The world will never again see quantities of military aircraft like the air armadas of World War II. In the more than four years when America was committed to global World War II combat, attrition was a reality best answered with increased production.

Efforts were made to retool peacetime industries to war production. When Grumman’s facilities were saturated making fighters, torpedo bombers, and amphibious transports for the Navy, General Motors was brought on board to help in the building of Wildcat fighters and Avenger torpedo bombers.

The famed Grumman F4F Wildcat shipboard fighter was a potent tool in the hands of combat pilots who understood how to leverage its strengths and avoid any weaknesses in combat with Japanese fighters. Though superseded in performance by the bigger F6F Hellcat, the doughty Wildcat still had a place in fleet operations aboard the emerging group of smaller escort carriers.

The Travel Air Company of Wichita launched in 1925 under the stewardship of three people who would go on to make their mark in aviation: Clyde Cessna, Walter Beech, and Lloyd Stearman, along with Walter Innes, Jr.

Though less well-known, Wichita business leader Innes was an important officer in the Travel Air company, as well as the later Stearman Aircraft Co.

For many, the name Travel Air conjures visions of a series of three-place biplane sport trainers of the 1920s. Lloyd Stearman gets much of the credit for designing the basic airframe, with inputs from his partners. 

The accelerated development of aeronautical knowledge and design from 1903 to the years just after World War I was a heady mix of discovery, science, and engineering, with the occasional entrepreneurial influence.

But if everybody had a new and better idea, the postwar U.S. Army Air Service determined that all the newfound ingenuity had to be quantifiable if the service was to make sound aircraft procurement decisions.

The Air Service had performance and design standards, and industry was given a handbook to guide their work intended for the military.

“For the Duration,” a term with poignant and hopeful symbolism in World War II, has gained currency in today’s media as commentators reference the unknown length of COVID-19 remediation and its effects on society. 

The phrase was used with quiet patriotic optimism in World War II as manufacturers of consumer goods told the American public that their factories were converted to only wartime production “For the Duration.”

Invoking “the Duration” during World War II was tacit acknowledgement of hardships to be borne. And the Duration was an unknown event some time in the future throughout the war, even as Allied victories raised hopes by 1943. Two more years of war would unfold before the Duration came to pass.

If there’s a certain cachet for being first in a field, there’s also the risk of being outmoded by the second entrant in that field.

The Boeing 247 airliner set a standard when it first flew on Feb. 8, 1933. An obvious replacement for the trimotored airliners then in service, the 247 built upon Boeing’s pioneering aluminum airframe work with the earlier single-engine Monomail transport and twin-engine B-9 bomber. 

The 247 was the first American low-wing multi-engine transport. It set the tone for airliners to follow.

The miracle of production capacity that saw the United States build about 35,000 four-engine bombers during World War II, along with 50,000 fighters and thousands of medium bombers, transports and trainers, was a juggernaut with many moving parts.

In the first full year of American participation in the war, military and industrial planners faced demands on a scale never before contemplated. 

The North American Aviation B-25 Mitchell medium bomber played a key role in the Allied victory in World War II around the globe.

Of the 9,800 B-25s built between 1940 and 1945, the U.S. Army Air Forces had more than a couple thousand in service at the height of the bomber’s employment in the war, while Great Britain and the Soviet Union also flew squadrons of Mitchells.

Responding to Air Corps requests for bomber designs, North American created the NA-40 twin engine bomber that first flew in January 1939. The NA-40 had promise, but warranted a redesign that became the B-25 of 1940.

By the last year of World War I, the major combatants had made significant contributions to the aeronautical state of the art.

America created the Liberty engine. Germany produced the advanced Fokker D.VII biplane fighter. France gave the Allies the sturdy and fast SPAD XIII. And England, after a bit of a rough start, produced one of the finest fighters of the war, the S.E. 5A.