and technological change enabled a mutational transformation of the social order of the United States.

The third transportation related paradigm shift occurred with the advent of commercial aviation. Beginning in the early decades of the XXth Century, commercial aviation in the United States was essentially the creation of the United States Postal Service. Mail hauling contracts were the dominant source of operating revenue for fledgling airline services until World War II. The carriage of passengers was limited due to basic infrastructure problems: the lack of planes that were big enough and safe enough to carry large numbers of people and the lack of airport and in-flight coordination facilities to handle a large number of planes. As wars are want to do, World War II injected a large dose of new flight technology and consumer demand into the mix. Following the war, aircraft became available that were able to carry an economically significant number of passengers. Moreover, the transition of the national economy from a wartime footing back to one aimed at personal goods and services created a large demand for high speed transportation that only aircraft could provide across the breadth of the entire country. So, aviation expanded. However, it did not enter the truly mutational stage until the late 1970’s.

As commercial aviation expanded following World War II, it was highly regulated by the federal government. This was much in keeping with the practice in most countries of establishing national airline companies to show the respective flags around the world. Within the United States, it was not in keeping with the social order to have an actual national airline. Rather, by heavily regulating all of the airlines, competition was strictly controlled in order to give everyone at least a piece of the pie. It was a very standards oriented approach, which had the effect of keeping airline expansion stifled and the resulting fare structure rather intimidating to the ordinary traveler. In the late 1970’s, as an act of the prevailing social order, the federal government deregulated the airline industry.

When deregulation came, it allowed a much more unfettered form of competition among the airlines. As competition is intended to do, it enticed a variety of product offerings from the airlines. The offerings were judged by the market, with many airlines merging and some going bankrupt. The result to the ordinary traveler, however, was the enhanced availability of high speed transportation throughout the nation, and the world for that matter, at remarkably low fares. The social result was the intermingling of the social orders of all nations at a level that had never been seen before. This is the process that the world is still engaged in, and the end game has yet to be played. As with the railroads and the interstate highways precedents, the impact of the technological advance is being strongly reflected in its impact on the social order. At the time of this writing, somewhat like the Internet, a social impact seems to be emanating outward from the United States. Also, as with the Internet, some social pushback seems certainly in the offing.

One of this book’s authors (Tim) was born and raised in a small town in an obscure section of western Oklahoma; itself something of a latecomer to the United States. This small town of Sayre was intriguingly situated at essentially the geographic schwerpunkt of the three transportation paradigms that we have been considering. Sayre is only a few hundred miles from the actual geographic center of the lower 48 United States. At quite literally the center of town, U.S. Route 66 and the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad intersected. With the advent of the interstate system, the mid-point of Interstate-40 was not far removed as it carried traffic from the east coast to the west coast. While the author was yet a boy, located within a concentric circle of less than 150 km radius was a collection of at least five Strategic Air Command bases, several Atlas missile silos containing intercontinental ballistic missiles tipped with thermonuclear warheads and, lest we forget, the Pantex facility at which were assembled many if not all of the tens of thousands of

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