Brian Potter, How to Build 300,000 Airplanes in Five Years, Construction Physics, May 23, 2024. This is a long and fascinating article. I'm not going to attempt to summarize it or excerpt the whole thing. But I'll give you two excerpts. The first is about production volume:
Prior to the war, aircraft were produced using small scale, job-shop type manufacturing methods: Individual aircraft were assembled in place piece by piece, largely by hand, not unlike the way cars had been built prior to Ford’s Model T. It was a slow, expensive, and labor-intensive process: ...
