That empire has its crowned heads and its prime ministers, its heroes of press and public like Howard Hughes, Corrigan and Lindbergh, its super-salesmen who must exhibit their product as well as sell it; its mechanics and engineers and draftsman and labourers—about 36,000 factory employees last year. It is an empire of real estate, for airfields—about 2,300 of them, constantly increasing in number and in size—comprise tHe bulk of its investment. It is an empire of airlines and commercial and private planes—some 10,800 planes, a greater number than in all the rest of the world combined; it is an empire of Mars in which 3,00 military~ and naval "planes drone in tight formations across the skies.
And it is an empire which has become an integral and an indispensable part of the greater empire which is our continent; 300,000,000 letters are forwarded annually by air; 2,600,000 people, more or less, fly regular airlines or on non-scheduled "hops: the nation has some 22,000 pilots and 30,000 flying students; the men who flew those old crates just three decades ago would have gazed today in fear and wonder at the far horizons of this American dominion which not even they could prefigure in their dreams.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.