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.

The historiography of Prohibition does a slightly better job of acknowledging the airplane. However, even here, the topic remains largely a footnote as the capacity of airplanes paled in comparison with what came over borders by boat and overland transport. There can be no doubt that Prohibition was far more important to the social construction of the airplane than the airplane was to the social construction of Prohibition. Yet, there is some admirable scholarship, including Anne Funderburg's Bootleggers and Beer Barons of the Prohibition Era, which features an entire chapter on the airplane's role in bootlegging. Unfortunately, she is unable to quantify the place of the airplane in the larger context and even she resorts to the anecdotal approach to laundry listing sundry episodes. Similar narrative interludes may be found in Sally Ling's Run the Rum In: South Florida During Prohibition and John Kobler's Ardent Spirits: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition.