With the Morrow Board policy and the Moffett five-year building program as its foundation, and the favorable climate of the new economic era as its medium, American aviation seemed to turn around almost overnight. The surviving domestic companies, impelled by the incentive of constructive competition, began forging ahead with their integrated programs of research, development, and production. Foreign designers who had languished in the bad atmosphere of war-torn Europe now began peddling their know-how in the promised land. Mr. Anthony Fokker, the rough-and-ready Dutch designer of the famous German Fokkers of World War I, appeared with a new transport designed around the Liberty engine. It had a welded-steel tubular fuselage and a thick monoplane wing made of plywood. With the Liberty it could be nothing but a “kluck” but with three Wright Whirlwind air-cooled radials, it was a hot number. When Dick Byrd planned to fly over the North Pole I wangled one of them for him which he used with conspicuous success. The smaller Fokker Universal made history in the Canadian bush. Igor Sikorsky, who, as a pioneer Russian pilot and constructor, had built the first four-engined bomber but had left revolution-torn Russia for free America, now designed a remarkably efficient big bomber or transport and began developing his twin-engined amphibian. Giuseppe Ballanca, after setting up shop in Wilmington, Delaware, produced a single-engined cargo carrier, designed around a single Wright Whirlwind engine with which Lt. C. C. Champion of BUAERO’s Engine Section, now headed by Henry Mullinix, won all the prizes for speed and efficiency at the Philadelphia national air races. And a new crop of American designers sprang up almost overnight. Tom Hamilton, of Milwaukee, built a single-motored, high-wing metal monoplane around the Pratt and Whitney Hornet engine and put it into service on many freight routes. Mr. Henry Ford, inspired by zeal to do something concrete for aviation, supported his chief engineer, William Mayo, in the development of the Ford Trimotor—a high-wing, metal monoplane built around three Wright Whirlwinds—and its sale to budding air transport lines at a price which would permit profitable operations. In this Mr. Ford was not prompted by the modern incentive of “tax loss”—that idea had not been born in an era of American initiative and enterprise. Numerous other enterprisers like Stearman, of Wichita, Kansas, and Stinson, of Detroit, Michigan, began creating private aircraft to exploit the coming boom in personal flying. Many, drawing the analogy with the automobile, were convinced that this boom had already arrived, and began building airports and flying services all over the country. Much of this building was based on shoestring finance, but some of it was sound. And all of it might have made steady progress except for one thing: speculation permeated the sound core of aviation just as it ate at the vitals of all other industry.