That was back when aviation was still fun. The Feds are so uptight now they'll yank your license for even thinking about pulling a stunt like that.
One galvanizing force was obvious: the Comet. Despite all the American skepticism, the Comet was in the flush of success in 1952. The British had done it, and they were reaping the prestige. There was a waiting list of a month or more on some Comet routes.
During the Korean War, Congress had put an "excess profits tax" in effect, intended to prevent military companies from making out too well because of increased demand during a war. As it happened, the law essentially defined "excess profits" as anything above what a company had made during the peacetime period of 1946-1949. For Boeing, of course, peace had been a sock to the pocketbook; it had hardly made anything in that time. Therefore, as orders ramped up for the war, Boeing stood to face the "excess profits" tax on virtually every dollar of its profit, while a company such as Douglas, which had had its hands full rolling out propeller-driven airliners after the war, wouldn't face the higher trigger until its military sales equaled the bonanza it had made on commercial sales.
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