In the meantime the United States had entered the war. At the beginning a great many newspaper editors who did not know the difficulties of constructing aircraft in quantity, and imagining that they could be produced as easily as automobiles, wrote glowing editorials demanding the immediate construction of 100,000 aeroplanes to invade Germany in the air and destroy her manufacturing industries, as well as terrorize the people into surrender. The Aircraft Production Board, however, realizing in a measure the difficulty of constructing aeroplanes in quantity, especially as there were very few aircraft factories in the country at that time which could deliver quantity production, planned to build only one-fourth that number. As a matter of fact, the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company was the only organization that was constructing aircraft on a large scale at Buffalo, N. Y., and the Curtiss plant in Toronto, Canada. Nevertheless, the Aircraft Production Board laid down plans for the production of 22,500 planes. Even this was too optimistical an estimate, although the Aircraft Production Board did not at that time realize it. This, however, has been explained in the official reports of the Aircraft Production Board by General Kenly, Howard E. Coffin, and John D. Ryan. To get into _production_ the Aircraft Production Board had the government take over a number of plants on a cost plus 10 per cent basis, and those companies immediately began to expand their manufacturing capacity to make the new orders the government was placing with them. The Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company, Dayton-Wright, Standard Aircraft, Rubay Company, Springfield Aircraft Corporation, Aero-marine Plane and Motor Company, the Fowler Aircraft Company, and a number of others received large orders from the government. Unfortunately, the Aircraft Production Board did not see fit to give orders to the smaller manufacturers in proportion to the size and capacity of their plants. Many of these smaller manufacturers could have produced a few machines for the government, and this would have tended to swell the whole to a greater figure. The inability of some of the manufacturers to increase their plants in proportion to the orders, naturally delayed the manufacture of aircraft.