UP FRONT

By Richard Mandel
Editor in Chief

Immelmans into Summer

With the same affinity I bear towards vintage movies and vintage cars, do I view older propeller aircraft, although I’m not in the market to take out a mortgage for one of my own. The difference between props and jets is like football before and after the invention of the forward pass. The jet thunders hard into the sky, a powerful fist punching at the clouds. (It’s an old adage, that with sufficient power, one could fly a barn door. Just look at the F117.) But the propeller plane rises with gentle intent, its airscrews pulling it along at a rate sufficient to produce the critical pressure differential around the wings. It’s a sight both stirring and bucolic. (I like telling folks who express consternation at riding prop-driven inter-city craft, “Look, when you see the propeller turning, it means the engine is running and everything’s fine. When you look at a jet engine from most passenger windows, you don’t see anything. The pilot could be playing a recording of a jet engine, and you’d never know!”)

So it is my sincere hope to grab some time and visit Dayton this year. Not because of the city’s reputation as The Hot Place for vacationing families, nor for its world-renowned cuisine, but for the Wright Patterson Air Force Museum — the largest museum facility in the world dedicated to aerospace. For this year is the Centennial of Powered Flight, marking that December day when Orville and Wilbur left their bicycle shop in Dayton and embraced 120 feet of sky at Kitty Hawk.

It is one hundred years of real engineering progress, willfully conquering gravity with a designed machine taking an occupant (and traveling companions, later) into the air with control over speed and direction. The early birds were delicate constructs with heavy motors — the later machines were convergences of motors with improved power-to-weight ratios and airworthiness researched in the new-fangled wind tunnel. Later would come designers like Clarence “Kelly” Johnson and Jack Northrop, who would leap over simple advances in design and produce aircraft like the P-38 and the YB-49.

Aviation enters its second hundred years on turbulent winds. The passengers are staying away because of fears of terrorists and news reports of crashes (which are few, considering how many aircraft take-off and land each day around the world), in turn sending airlines into receivership and manufacturers out of business. Accomplishments with military aircraft have been sporadic, partly because of budget slashes, partly because of changes in the kind of enemy we’ve come to fight. The War in Iraq this year produced a headline that trumpeted American allies swiftly controlling Iraqi airspace, but it was a hollow announcement — rather like saying your Corvette overwhelmed a field of competing soap-box derby racers.

But, bad news is as hard not to view as a highway accident. Aviation will be recorded as one the pillars of great social change in the 20th century. Like the automobile, television and radio, the telephone and the Internet, the airplane utterly altered our perception of distance and time. Coast-to-coast transportation of people and goods has gone from weeks to hours (minutes by spacecraft). Flying machines ferry injured people from remote locations (like the South Pole) to medical facilities, while metal birds swarm to save forests from fiery devastation. We can hop over oceans in less than a day, if we choose to vacation in far-away lands. Moreover, business is international in scope because products move quickly between countries within the cargo hold of a 747.

This is a centennial worth celebrating, whether you also make the trip to Dayton, go to the airport with the kids, or pull a book from the local library about aviation history. Still, some Luddites may raise the old invocation of “if G-d meant for man to fly, he’d have given him wings.” Either way, we’re not about to give those wings back, for we have experienced the intoxication of flight.