Free China Airborne by James Fallows Page A

simple idea that choices you made yesterday affect the choices available to you today. It is easier for the Seattle area to maintain an aerospace industry, since one has grown there over the past century, than it would be for New Orleans to start one from scratch. The same applies to New York with finance, greater Boston with higher education and medicine, Houston with the energy business, and so on. Nations, regions, cities, and companies can of course change from one path to another—that’s why we speak of historic rises and declines. China’s development strategy over the past thirty years can be seen as one mammoth attempt to will itself onto the path of modern industrial development.
    Through the half century after the Wright brothers’ first flight, aerospace developments in most of the world followed a path that was more or less similar from one country to another, but quite different from what China is attempting now. We naturally think of aviation as being a huge, concentrated enterprise that only a few global megafirms can afford to compete in. But in its early days, airplane inventors, designers, and entrepreneurs were at work on almost every continent, including those who started their own small companies before Bill Boeing did.
    Many countries had nascent aerospace tech-business centers. Apart from the United States, they included Australia, Brazil,Canada, Czechoslovakia, England, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Poland, Russia, Sweden, and more. In most of them the sequence that eventually led to an aircraft industry was more or less the same. First there was the rapid spread of a hobbyist approach to aviation, typified by the barnstorming culture of daredevil pilots and air shows. Everything about flying in those days was hazardous. Orville Wright himself was nearly killed in a crash at Fort Myer, just outside Washington, D.C., in 1908, when the Wrights were demonstrating their airplane to the U.S. Army in order to qualify for military contracts. His passenger, the young army lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, who died in the crash and was later buried in Arlington Cemetery, is generally considered to be the first person ever killed in an airplane accident.
    But even as the barnstorming era sustained public excitement about aviation, three longer-term “real” markets for airplanes and air services began to emerge: the military; airmail transport; and the bare beginnings of a passenger-airline business. The sagas of those early decades are very much like recent accounts of the evolution of computer and Internet start-ups: Entrepreneurs across the United States, Europe, South America, and elsewhere founded their small aircraft companies in a warehouse or a barn. Most failed in the short run—or, if they survived, were taken over by competitors. Even so, to a large extent these companies, reflecting their founders’ energies and ambitions, managed to push the technological or commercial frontiers of aerospace at least slightly forward while they were around. Although Bill Boeing’s name is now the best known of those early innovators, through aviation’s early decades he was a small player in a field that attracted people already well known for other successes. Henry Ford branched out from cars to make the popular Ford Tri-Motor, which was a refinementof a Fokker design from the Netherlands. During World War II, Ford’s Willow Run assembly plant became the world’s largest aircraft-production facility. Howard Hughes, of course, built his
Spruce Goose
. Geoffrey De Havilland founded and led what became Britain’s most important aircraft company. Ryan, Northrop, Grumman, Sikorsky, McDonnell, Douglas, Fairchild, Vought, Curtiss, and many others had names that for a while were synonymous with aircraft—as did the Loughead brothers of California, with their Lockheed company. 8 They had their counterparts across Europe. In the Soviet Union, where the state made all the airplanes, the famous names were of the