East Africa's transportation development model tended toward balanced growth. Therefore, the East African government encouraged the civil aviation industry to grow bigger and stronger while restraining its blind expansion, thereby stabilizing the development of railways, highways, and other forms of transport.
At this stage, the main area of competition between civil aviation and rail and road transport was passenger travel, with the greatest pressure falling especially on railway passenger services.
As for water transport, passenger travel was not particularly important to it. Or rather, the speed of water transport found it difficult to meet the public's travel needs. On land, water transport had previously been unable to compete with the passenger services of railways and highways. After the emergence of aircraft, as time passed, aviation would inevitably replace ocean liners as the foremost choice for international long-distance passenger travel. Aviation would surpass maritime transport in international passenger travel in roughly the next twenty or thirty years.
Even though East Africa's civil aviation industry was not regulated as loosely as that of the United States, it had in fact already pulled ahead of the world, the result of many factors.
Politically, the East African government had been among the first to value the development of civil aviation. Technologically, East Africa had been one of the first nations in the world to invest in the aviation industry, and it possessed the world's largest number of related workers and research institutions.
In terms of market demand, the East African mainland alone covered as much as thirteen million square kilometers. Its north-south straight-line distance exceeded four thousand kilometers, while its east-west span reached three thousand kilometers, creating enormous demand for civil aviation.
In terms of regional development, civil aviation was of great significance to northern East Africa and the southwestern regions, because transport routes