With their pockets turned out, the men who once built 96,000 planes a year last week pleaded for help. The aviation industry was critically ill, they told President Truman's Air Policy Commission*; only a liberal transfusion of federal funds could save it.
The crisis was of prime importance, not only to planemakers, but to everyone in the U.S. The aircraft industry, along with air transport and foreign air routes, was a major instrument of U.S. foreign policy, U.S. defense. Yet plane production has withered away until the current annual rate is only...
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