Conclusion The widespread lawlessness of American aviators in the Prohibition era appears in tension with the expansive political and cultural campaigns to legitimize and normalize aviation in American society for the establishment of an "air-minded" nation. The criminality of prominent aviators like Erle Halliburton and Ed Musick points to an apparent contradiction between normative and deviant behavior that can only be explained by the existence of broader discourse that posited aerial smuggling as a disruptive techno-cultural practice that was complementary to the broader rhetoric of the airplane as a socially transformative innovation.

The legacy of the airplane's role in illicit activity between 1911 and 1939 has long been underrepresented. The use of the airplane in unregulated or illegal commerce at a time when active aeronautical commerce was still a significant unknown provided a degree of confidence that might otherwise have existed. The culture of smuggling fed the stereotype of the adventurous tough-guy aviator and seems to have increased the appeal of the profession. Aerial smuggling forced the nation to ask, if criminals were already air-minded, shouldn't the rest of the country be as well? Prohibition was enabled by the shift towards increased state authority in the mobilization of the First World War. It was also doomed by that same mobilization as many worldly veterans found the dry movement arcane in aftermath of the cataclysm and social upheaval with which they had been associated. Air-mindedness represented an opposite - a break from the "grounded" thinking that had led to war and the hope for a diminution for the rigid veneration of boundaries that was inherent in nationalistic militarism. If tariffs and Prohibition were the stuff of excessively rigid state control, the airplane represented an undoing of the old notions of interchange between nations, whether civil or military. Aviators perceived themselves at the forefront of this disruptive modernism.