"The aim of this book is to demonstrate that Franklin D. Roosevelt was one of the leading agents in both setting out and working to implement the principles that came to govern the international aviation system from 1945 down to the recent present and that much of its design was drawn from the experience of domestic US aviation reform in the 1930s. In contemporary parlance one might say that what is proposed here is the explanation of the genesis of a roadmap set out successively by Roosevelt's administrations for the achievement of a liberalized and lightly regulated international civil aviation market. Furthermore, a key contention of this research is that FDR himself played a much more important role in crafting policy than has previously been acknowledged"--