12 seconds in the air

"WE see centuries' worth of imagination brought to a bleak, almost completely anonymous fruition."

That's how Patrick Smith, an American pilot and writer, summarizes his feelings about a photograph capturing the first successful flight of the Wright brothers' "Flyer," on December 17, 1903. There were no crowds, no publicity when Flyer took off on a cold winter day, from a beach in North Carolina.

There has been a flurry of articles about 100 years of aviation, acknowledging the Wright brothers' flight as a turning point in humanity's attempts to take to the sky, but Smith is right about that event being almost anticlimactic after centuries of more dramatic experiments.

As early as 1000 B.C. the Chinese were sending off humans in large kites to spy on enemy troops and in the year 1010 A.D., we hear of a Benedictine monk, Oliver of Malmesbury, taking off from his monastery, apparently imitating the mythological character Icarus and flying a distance of 125 paces before falling and breaking his legs. There were others who were even less fortunate than the monk, losing their lives as they tried to fly with contraptions that mostly tried to imitate the birds.

In the 15th century, the genius Leonardo da Vinci anticipated the modern helicopter with a design for an "aerial screw," which scientists today say would have worked with a few modifications. Da Vinci never tried manned flights.

In 1783, the French brothers, Joseph and Jacques Montgolfier, successfully launched hot-air balloons over several months: in June, a balloon without anything in it; in September, with a rooster, duck and sheep; and then finally in December, two men but not the brothers themselves. That first manned balloon floated 3,500 in the air and drifted 36 kilometers.

In 1804, Sir George Caley successfully launched a precursor of our airplane today: a glider, which was still an imitation of birds in flight. But these machines just didn't seem feasible for sustained flights. In the end, the answers had to come from the Wright brothers, two high school dropouts (see?) who made their living selling bicycles. Their answer to the mystery of flight actually came from their business, when they realized that they needed to build a contraption that could "balance" itself in the air much like we do on the ground when we bike.

The successful debut of the Wright Flyer took all of 12 seconds, covering a mere 37 meters. You might ask, what was the big deal then?

Well, if it were not for the Wright brothers, we'd probably still be flying around in gliders, balloons and zeppelins over limited distances, and risking our lives. The Hindenberg airship explosion in 1937 was an example of what could happen, a Titanic in the sky. Gliders were also limited because you're pretty much left to the mercy of the winds. No wonder hang-gliding is a recreational sport, meant for the more adventurous.

The Wright brothers' Flyer was the first powered, manned and controlled flight, opening possibilities for long-distance aviation. Yet that first flight was mentioned only in three newspapers. Using their own funds, the brothers improved their machine and, three months later, were able to get their Flyer into the air for 45 minutes. They wrote their congressman asking for help, and got a form letter saying the US government did not fund "experiments."

In October 1905, the Wright brothers launched the third successful flight for their Flyer, this time covering 24 miles in 38 minutes. They wrote the US government asking for financial support, and were again rebuffed.

It was not until 1908 that the US War Department finally saw the potential of these flying machines and made their first purchase. In the years that followed, these machines developed rapidly, with many other scientists joining in to develop their own versions and with governments subsidizing the production of these planes for mail service, transport... and war.

Planes became killing machines, allowing humans to wreak tremendous damage on the enemy from a safe distance. The full horror of this potential is exemplified by the atomic bombs dropped from US war planes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese.

On the bright side, planes have allowed us to travel much faster, radically transforming the ways we deal with each other, whether for business, politics, diplomacy, science, or for personal matters. As recently as the 19th century, few imagined that one day "flying" would no longer be metaphorical, as in flying home to marry that childhood sweetheart, to catch the birth of a child, or, on a sadder note, to be by someone's deathbed or to bid farewell to the deceased.

It took several thousand years for early humans to move out of Africa into the rest of the world. Then we learned to navigate the oceans with ships, cutting travel time, from continent to continent, down to years, then to months. Today, you can take several flights in succession to literally chase the sun, going around the world in less than two days.

But note that we seem to have reached the limits to speed with airplanes. When the jet age was ushered in by the Boeing 707 in 1959, non-stop flying time from New York to Los Angeles was six hours. That's about the same flying time today even with the newer jets.

There was, of course, the Concorde, which flew faster than the speed of sound, but it was phased out just last year because it was too expensive. Today, the airline industry is oriented toward developing jumbo jets for longer, rather than faster flights, and packing more passengers into each flight, especially into cattle -- oops, I mean economy -- class.

Next month, Singapore Airlines will inaugurate a non-stop flight between Singapore and Los Angeles, which will keep passengers up in the air for a record 18 hours for the 8,000-mile trip. We've come a long way indeed from that 12-second, 37-meter flight, a hundred years ago.

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