Ever since early humans saw birds fly, and realized that they could not, the yearning for flight must have existed, for what? Tens of thousands of years, at the very least? I’m sure that birds must have represented food, at first. At some point, you figure, a caveman scratched his head while watching his lunch soar away, and sadly wondered, “Dang. Why can’t I do that?” It wasn’t just about food, surely. Perhaps the birds were thought to be gods, or spirits with special powers, but certainly, as the centuries passed, the fascination with flight never left us earth-bound creatures. We envy the birds. We want to fly alongside them, and adopt the third dimension into our two-dimensional world.
But this was not to be for many, many thousands of years, when geniuses such as Leonardo Da Vinci started toying with rudimentary gliders, inspired by watching how birds actually flew. It would take another century or two before Otto Lilienthal launched himself off a hillside, harnessed in a glider of his own design. From there it was only a matter of a very few years, a miniscule time measured against the millennia since our envy of the birds began, before a couple of bicycle mechanics from Ohio lifted themselves and their fame into the sky, off the sandy beaches of North Carolina. It was perhaps the most significant turning point in the history of the world. Since that time, we have not only soared with the birds, we have bested them in speed and altitude, flying to the edge of space, faster than sound, and beyond. And within the space of one century and two world wars, domination of the skies became the key to victory in war.
Yet today, the ability to fly anywhere, to any corner of the globe, has become so commonplace that we simply take it for granted. It is no longer magic, no longer an adventure, no longer astonishing that we can now soar with the birds. It is almost boring. Why? Perhaps it is because we have lost a sense of our own history, not simply as a nation, but as a species, homo sapiens. We don’t seem to remember how we got here.
I had the good fortune of growing up in a time when I could witness many milestones in powered flight. Jet powered aircraft were new, right on the heels of World War 2. The Germans were the first to deploy them in combat, but it was too late, fortunately, to make any difference in the war’s outcome. The F-86 Sabre Jet was the top dog in our fighter plane arsenal in the ’50s. The de Havilland Comet, flying for British Overseas Airways Corporation, became the first jet aircraft to enter commercial service, in 1952. It was an era of one incredible accomplishment after another, culminating on July 20, 1969, when a human boot-print appeared on the surface of the Moon.
My ambition to become a pilot had been set aside by that time, for a variety of reasons, but the desire to be among the clouds has never left me. My solution? To fly vicariously. Expanding on my youthful passion for building model airplanes that fly, I have now built and flown a model of every winged aircraft that ever inspired me, from the Piper Cub to the XB-70, amounting to 40 or so model airplanes, radio controlled. Most all of them have survived my piloting, and hang in my office, workshop, and living room. And I am still building them, because I enjoy the process.
Occasionally I fly off the beach where we vacation, but I see that younger people take no notice of it. The only ones who do are my age, some of them retired pilots themselves, but all in touch with that inner twelve-year-old kid who still marvels at the wonder of flight.
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