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This article examines the development of US international civil aviation policy between 1944 and 1964, as the USA instituted policies to expand and protect the global aviation opportunities of its airlines. This entailed hard bargaining with the British and others to establish and maintain the Bermuda formula as well as efforts to contain and isolate Soviet and Soviet Bloc aviation behind the Iron Curtain. By the mid-1950s, the success of American aviation policy was clear. But thereafter, as the capabilities of non-American airlines increased and the needs of American carriers changed, the effectiveness of containing Soviet Bloc aviation and maintaining the Bermuda formula waned. Responding to the changing realities of international aviation, the Kennedy administration undertook a reassessment of American aviation policy that recognised the inability of isolating Soviet and Soviet bloc aviation and the need to modify the Bermuda principles to better protect the competiveness of American flag carriers.

This article examines Canada's role in post-war planning for international civil aviation and how it was influenced by plans emanating from both London and Washington. Canadian aviation policy was driven by ambitions not easily reconciled: collective-security idealism; commercial advantage; the desire to reconcile British and US policies; and to raise Canada's international profile. These issues are explained and analysed in the lead-up to and in the events of the Chicago International Civil Aviation Conference in November-December 1944. What emerges challenges a considerable part of the conventional wisdom about Canada's diplomacy and the role it played at Chicago through a more nuanced picture of both motives and the stage upon which the civil-aviation drama was played out.