In aeronautical terms, peace meant the flooding of a nascent civil aviation industry with cheap surplus aircraft and thousands of unfulfilled and rambunctious young veteran aviators who did not have the chance to slake their thirst for adventure in the skies over Western Europe. Though a number of first person accounts and journalists drew attention to the intersection of Prohibition and the emergence of barnstorming culture, it is curiously absent or skirted in the most highly regarded scholarly studies of the period. For instance, Joseph Corn ignores it entirely in his Winged Gospel. Roger Bilstein in Flight Patterns gives voice to Benny Howard, designer of bootlegging airplanes, who stated, "The thing that built aviation to start with … that really held its pants up … was the bootlegging." Howard is the anecdotal representative of aerial bootlegging for most scholars who at least acknowledge the existence of interwar aerial criminality. Bilstein characterizes Howard's perspective as, "Barnstormers helped keep up interest in aviation, but only the bootleggers consistently put money in it." This astounding assessment passes without further comment on the part of Bilstein. If what Howard said has a grain of truth, then it deserves further investigation beyond what aerospace historians have given it thus far. David Courtwright in his Sky as Frontier echoes Bilstein noting, "In a way the 1919 Volstead Act, rather than the 1925 Kelly Bill, provided the first federal subsidy to commercial aviation" so that "at a time when joy riding prices were declining, liquor runs kept pilots in the air." Again, in spite of the significant implications of this assessment, Courtwright does not press the issue further. If smuggling did sustain, if not energize, commercial aviation in the United States, then why not map that causality further? A simple answer is that it is not easily done due to the nature of illicit activity and the record keeping associated with it.