When World War I ended in 1918 it had cost some nine million lives, and about 15,000 of those lost were airmen. While that might not seem to be a significant percentage, the numbers testified to aviation’s loss of innocence. It had played its part in a brutal conflict, and was no longer simply the recreational adventure it had been before the outbreak of hostilities in 1914. But the maturation process forced on the airplane by war had opened vast possibilities for air travel upon the return of peace, and those who had been employed to design, build and fly airplanes for military purposes turned their attention, and applied all they had learned, to the commercial potential of these wondrous new machines, still only 15 years old.
Airplanes had become sturdy, and they had become clearly recognizable as the ancestors of today’s propeller-powered flying machines, with an engine in front, wings not far behind, and tailfeathers at the end of the fuselage. Gone was the flimsy look that marked the frail, tentative machines of aviation’s infancy. As backlash to the famous wing failures of the Blériot monoplanes, biplanes ruled during WWI. There were exceptions, but for the most part aviation in WWI relied on two sets of stoutly braced wings or more (the most notable example of more being the Fokker Triplane favored by von Richthofen).
