The Forgotten Pioneer

When it began, aviation was a tinkerer’s realm. The Wright Brothers were bicycle mechanics. Transforming it into an industry relied on men who envisioned it as a business on par with railroads. Men like Glen Curtis, William Boeing, and Clement Keys. Today many remember the Wrights, Curtis and Boeing. The most important man of all, Clement Keys, is forgotten.

Edward M. Young's Aviation as a Business: Clement M. Keys and the Formation of the American Aviation Industry is a biography of aviation’s forgotten man.

Keys’s influence on early American aviation is indelible. Canadian-born Keys began as a business reporter for the Wall Street Journal, their transportation business expert (at the time, mainly railroads). He began providing investment advice and then became a financier.

He became one of Glen Curtiss’ financial advisors before World War I. When the US entered that war, Curtiss Aeroplane Company expanded. Keys came on board to help obtain financing, ultimately becoming the company’s president and director. For the next fifteen years he was one of the most influential people in America’s nascent aviation industry.

Through 1931 he headed Curtiss. He steered it out of impending bankruptcy in 1919, building it into the continent’s largest aircraft manufacturer. He merged it with Wright, forming Curtiss-Wright.

That alone was enough to put him in aviation’s hall of fame. Yet he was also involved in organizing and running what became three major American Airlines: United Airlines, TWA, and Eastern Airlines. He organized National Air Transport to fly airmail in the Eastern US. (It merged with Boeing Air Transport to form United.) Transcontinental Air Transport was formed to provide coast-to-coast passenger service, eventually becoming TWA. Eastern Air Transport was part merger, part bailout. It became Eastern Airlines.

More than that, Keys influenced passage of the 1926 Air Commerce Act, which established today’s commercial aviation system. He also got the military to stop its destructive competitive bidding system, where it bought the intellectual property of an aircraft design and then had the design built by the lowest bidder. Penny-wise and dollar-foolish, it penalized companies with in-house design teams. Pure manufacturers could always underbid those paying the design house overhead.

A series of business missteps and simple exhaustion forced Keys out of aviation during the Great Depression. He was subsequently forgotten. Aviation as a Business restores Keys to the prominence his contributions earned. For those interested in aviation history, it is a must-read.

“Aviation as a Business: Clement M. Keys and the Formation of the American Aviation Industry,” by Edward M. Young, Texas A&M University Press, June 2026, ‎ 352 pages, $118.61 (Hardcover)

This review was written by Mark Lardas, who writes at Ricochet as Seawriter. Mark Lardas, an engineer, freelance writer, historian, and model-maker, lives in League City, TX. His website is marklardas.com.