Commercial aviation was born in the later years of World War I, and so too was the need for air traffic control. With a sudden post-war excess of military aircraft, Britain and France began converting their light, reliable bombers into mail planes. Consequently, air traffic density all of a sudden became an imminent hazard, a congested airscape whose danger peaked in 1922, when a Farman Goliath and a De Havilland DH-18 collided 60 nautical miles north of Paris, killing all on board.
Regulators and authorities responded by instituting air traffic corridors and beacon-based navigation systems—and eventually, around 1930, air traffic control towers began appearing in the UK. In 1935, the first Flight Monitoring Center appeared in Newark.
