China National Aviation Corporation
The China National Aviation Corporation () was a Chinese airline which was nationalized after the Chinese Communist Party took control in 1949, and merged into the People's Aviation Company of China () in 1952. It was a major airline under the Nationalist government of China. It was headquartered in Shanghai as of 1938. History On 5 April 1929 the Executive Yuan of the Nationalist government of China based in Nanjing established the Chinese National Aviation Corporation, a state owned company with an authorized capital of ten million yuan. Sun Fo, Minister of Railways and son of Sun Yat Sen served as its first chairman although the real power lay with the Minister of Communications, Wang Boqun. Two weeks later on 17 April, the Nationalists entered into a service contract with an American firm, Aviation Exploration Inc which was to establish air routes between a few of the major treaty ports and manage all operations. Aviation Exploration Inc was a personal holding company of the U.S. aviation magnate Clement Melville Keys who at the same time was the president of Curtiss-Wright and a few other aviation firms. In June 1929, Keys set up China Airways Federal to manage the new airmail routes between Canton, Shanghai and Hankou. This new Sino-American venture faced acute resistance from military factions in South China: warlords had their own small air forces which had ambitions to earn income from airmail service between the treaty ports. Even more ominous was the opposition from Wang Po-chun the Minister of Communications; in July 1929, he went ahead and set up an airmail service, Shanghai-Chengtu Airways, owned entirely by his ministry. Wang imported Stinson planes and competed with China Airways Federal on the Shanghai-Hankou route. He became in effect the father of China's civil aviation. Despite all the odds, on 21 October 1929, China Airways Federal launched the airmail and passenger service with an inaugural flight from Shanghai to Hankou. It continued to face overwhelming political and financial difficulties, not least from the Ministry of Communications which not only collected airmail revenue from its own service but from that of China Airways Federal. By the start of 1930 China Airways Federal was at the point of bankruptcy and threatened to stop operations altogether unless the Ministry of Communications released its revenue. An old China hand named Max Polin managed to broker a new deal between China Airways Federal and the Ministry of Communication. On 8 July, the two rival airmail operators merged into a reconfigured China National Aviation Corporation, which thereafter was better known by its acronym, CNAC. The Chinese government had a 55 percent share and Keys' interests had a 45 percent share in CNAC. The Keys share in CNAC wound up in Intercontinent Aviation, another holding company that he had established in 1929 to handle foreign airline investments; by that stage Intercontinent itself had become part of North American Aviation, another firm founded by Keys in 1928. From 1931 until 1948 William Langhorne Bond was operations manager and