Something similar happened in the skies. International aviation relies on standards. Air traffic controllers and pilots must speak the same language, plane parts must be similar enough that repairs can be made in any country, and the world’s radio frequencies must be arranged so that the navigational channels in one country are the same as in the next. Representatives of the U.S. aviation industry worked aggressively to secure all these objectives and to make sure that the language of the air was English. By 1950, they had largely succeeded.
