Fred stressed the fundamental difference between the airplane and other mechanisms. Most things produced in factories would wear out in time and replacement furnished the manufacturer with a continuing source of business. The airplane, on the other hand, would never wear out; the high quality required for dependable service meant that the goods would last forever. The only sources of business were expansion and crash losses, and even these were limited. In other words, even while the aircraft manufacturer must strive to increase his quality in the interest of safety, in the process he works himself out of production. There appeared to be only one solution to this problem, and that was the factor of obsolescence. In things like clothing, or automobiles, or what have you, the trick was to so modify the styling as to keep the customer “just enough dissatisfied with what he has to persuade him to buy something new.” Fred ascribed this precept to his friend “Boss” Kettering, of General Motors. But the factor of styling, so important in some lines, had no bearing in aviation. Here performance was the key to progress: in military aircraft it was speed, climb, and ceiling; in air transport it was dollars per ton-mile. And the degree to which this last factor was important to the commercial airlines depended upon the intensity of economic competition between them. Bill Boeing, for instance, might have continued to use the war-surplus Liberty-engined DH’s indefinitely, had not competition for the air-mail contract forced him to risk a low bid and then build new aircraft to meet his own standards. And so price competition, which many were beginning to think was cutthroat and destructive, was over-all, the key to progress in aeronautics. The engine manufacturer, for instance, must experiment with new ideas, conduct research into strange fields, and come up with something so economical that the airline operator can’t get along without it. That will obsolete his airplanes, retire them to some embryonic service that cannot yet afford new types, and force him to introduce the newest and latest models—or else go out of business. Competition, Fred insisted, was not destructive, but creative; it was tough on the one who lost his shirt, but favorable to the public at large.