The inside cover of our May 7, 1923 edition featured an austere advertisement from a small government contractor, the Boeing Airplane Co. of Seattle.

It was followed by article highlighting concerns about the absence of commercial aviation in the U.S.  “Development work entails great costs and manufacturers are naturally not anxious to spend money on machines which answer the yet largely hypothetical requirements of air transport,” our editors wrote. Rather defensively, they also dismissed comparisons with Europe’s more advanced commercial aviation sector.

“What the critic fails to see is that the much-vaunted European air liner, even if it be fast enough, has such a poor climb that it can hardly stagger out of an airport and has to operate at a few hundred feet altitude all along the route for lack of excess power. On our transcontinental airways such a performance would be out of the question, for a London-Paris air liner would not have ceiling enough to clear the mountain tops between New York and Cleveland, not to speak of the Rockies.” 

By the end of the decade, Americans would be able to fly on the Model 80, a new airliner that could (just barely) clear the Rockies. Its developer was Boeing.

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