Aircraft Industry Without World War I

The WWI surplus market really hurt postwar business.
Why buy a new two seater when you could get a surplus Jenny that the Government bought for $8000 in 1917 for $500, and why rebuild an OX-5 engine for it, when you could buy new crate motors for scrap aluminum price?

Yes, it was boom and bust. The surplus pilots were reduced to stunts and barn-storming to make a living from the skills they had, Even aircraft development would have been suppressed with the over-supply of cheap equipment. The biggest impact is that people had less money and it was only worth half as much.
 
I'd say airship tech can keep them flying past the '40s. .......
US Navy flew into the 1960s because they found looted longer than any other flying machine. Their envelopes contained massive early warning radars to detect Russian ships and airplanes.
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........I can picture seaplanes landing on rivers. STOL might be more in demand ....
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STOL is vital for seaplanes because faster take-off speeds require hull strengthening that increases with the square of the lift-off speed. IOW th slowed your lift-playing off, the lighter your hull.
 
......... Don't forget winter - once you begin to get ice, forget seaplanes and in the spring you have to wait until it is all cleared up before you can have operations. ..........
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Floatplanes can land and take-off from snow or even wet grass. Those landings rarely wreck floatplanes, but do wear them out in the long run. Often sacrificial keel strips are installed. Normally they only do the that at the end of the season.

The most amusing story was written by a BC Bush pilot who landed his floatplane (Norseman?) on a snow-covered alpine lake. When he tried to walk to a cabin on the shoreline, he sank up to his waist in powder snow!
Hah!
Hah!
The next morning, he repeated the arduous walk to the plane, then easily toke-off from the snow.
 
The biplane format standardized in the teens and twenties with its forest of struts and wires. How much of that was tied to the combination of aerodynamic stress for combat needs and the ensuing familiarity with that format as a production model? IF there's no WW1, would that impact the eventual shift to cantilevered monoplanes in any way?

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Wire-braced biplanes have lighter empty weights than strut-braced monoplanes. Strut-braced monoplanes are still lighter but draggier than cantilever monoplanes.
Biplanes are also light because they are also ssentialy box beams 5 it more feet thick.
Light weight was vital for pioneers like Bleriot, Curtiss, Farman, Wright, etc. because their engines were so weak. Reducing drag increased in importance as cruise speeds increased.
Reducing drag also increased in important as instrument flight and flight into known icing became more popular. FIKI also favours retractable gear because retractable’ means 2 or 3 fewer places for ice to accumulate. Consider that Transport Canada reduced Cessna Caravans’ FIKI certification after a few crashed. All those wing struts and the exposed (fixed) landing gear struts accumulated too much ice.
 
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