Shortround6
Major General
The British did try to push the envelope at times with the Empire Mail service. But that does not result in large orders per design type.So, as I see it, aviation in Europe between the wars is more driven by military than civil needs. And the question is then how to get from the biplanes of 1930 to the Superfortress of 1942.
It also sometimes causes stagnation. There were multiple British design teams chasing different requirements. African routes needed different planes than European routes and routes to Africa required different aircraft again and..................
It may be good and it may be bad, a lot of design teams got experience but it many cases the aircraft were not 'competitive' except in the sense that on some routes they were competing with another countries national airline. Which were flown by aircraft produced by the home country if the country was big enough to have an aircraft industry.
The British were not helped at times in the early 30s by a certain magazine editor and others who believed things that had no factual basis (like biplanes would climb faster than monoplanes).
Setting some of your short city to city schedules on whither you could get a decent lunch served and eaten before the plane landed might not have been the way to advance aeronautical knowledge
The greater distances in the US did make speed a higher priority for a number of reasons. On short flights a faster plane could get in more flights per day to return investment quicker.
On longer flights a faster plane could fly more stages or longer ones on multiple day/overnight flights.
for domestic flights the British rail service was a stiff competitor since there were a number of express routes between major cities. Cutting an hour or so off those train trips was not going to cause a mass boom in air travel. For the US the trains took just over 20 hours to go from New York to Chicago so even if the plane needed to stop once for fuel a "fast" plane could make the trip in under 5 hours.
Boeing was disappointed when they only sold 75 of 247 model. Very few British airliners sold more than 10 planes. The same could be said for French and Italian aircraft.
things over lapped but the MacRobertson Trophy Air Race of Oct 1934 is an indicator, The DH 88 was a marvelous airplane but the Boeing 247 which finished 3rd (and was full of fuel tanks) was narrowly beaten DC-2 which was flying passengers to and from standard stops on it's route. The DC-2 also got lost and bogged down in the mud on landing and was pulled out by residents of the town.
This is 1934, it is a commercial airliner in service with a customer, The wings and tail (and engines ? ) were used in those obsolete B-18 bombers in 1940-42. The B-18 was obsolete in 1940. But the US aircraft industry sure didn't believe the B-18/ DC-2 was world standard at time.