The connection between aerial bootlegging and other forms of smuggling is particularly important as it established an enduring culture of aerial criminality in the United States that not only endured through the end of federal Prohibition, but that also continues to this day. Thirdly, the federal response to criminality and the other concerns inherent in the growth of civil aviation in the form of the 1926 Air Commerce Act did not yield significant changes in the long term resulting from the registration of aircraft and the licensing of pilots. If 1928 appears not to have been a particularly active year in aerial smuggling, the preceding and succeeding years were. The introduction of cabin monoplanes and multi-engine transports in the late 1920s appear to have only made smuggling more popular, efficient, and profitable in the era of air regulation than it had been before. Lastly, the media accounts chart the rise of a national discourse around the culture of aerial smuggling that inculcated popular values by establishing rhetorical tropes of normal and deviant aeronautical behavior. This further developed a spectrum of criminality that, on one end, tolerated aerial bootlegging, which often served the purpose of underlining the progress of aviation in integrating American society - i.e. if the airplane is good for bootlegging, it must be good at other, more beneficent, activities. At the other end of the spectrum, was the trope of the nihilistic criminal enterprise that employed aviators without scruples who would (according to the mythology) jettison their human cargo of smuggled Chinese aliens from a trapdoor in the bottom of their airplane at the first sign of trouble. This type of nuanced evaluation of aerial criminality and its social construction has thus far been overlooked by scholars.