One Non-Delusion: A Glimmer Of Hope Amid Economic Calamities

But nearly all of that potential progress was derailed by the Great Depression of the 1930s, when the thought of buying an aircraft was the last thing on most people's minds. 

Enter the rise of fascism in Europe and Asia in the mid-1930s and the world war it ignited.  World War II would change everything we thought we knew about flying. By the time of Pearl Harbor, airplanes were far more reliable, more durable, better performing and more readily available than ever before. And for hundreds of thousands of men, and more than a few women, around the world, the dream of flying got gift-wrapped by their respective governments and dropped in their laps, though hundreds of thousands paid the ultimate price for that training. 

While firm numbers are hard to come by, based on the hundreds of thousands of air crewmembers trained each by the United States and Great Britain, along with what must have been even greater numbers in the Soviet Union and perhaps Germany, it's likely that nations trained more than a million pilots, and possibly as many as 2 million, in the years leading up to and during World War II. Hundreds of thousands of pilots perished during the war in battle and, even more commonly, in training accidents. But by the end of the global conflict, hundreds of thousands more returned home, many of them hoping to keep flying as private citizens somehow.