For 100 Years, we’ve been flying heavier than air craft. Just 100 years. Personally, I’m still awestruck at the leaps in technologies that happened in the past 100 years. We’ve gone through two World Wars. Developed vaccines to eliminate worldwide illnesses (like smallpox). Split the atom, for good and bad. Discovered DNA. Al Gore “invented” the Internet. And we put people on the lunar surface.
Hey, for me it’s not just the anniversary of heavier-than-air powered flight. It seems like the dawn of an age of something bigger. . . Call me sentimental.
Tripler
Orville and Wilbur, I raise a toast to you.
As a member of Civil Air Patrol, in New York wings Nation Cadet Competition Team I was forced to learn that on 17 December 1903, at 1035am Orville Wright flew took off at Kitty Hawk North Carolina in Man’s first powered, sustained heavier then air flight. He was airborne for 12 seconds, and traveled a distance of 120 feet until the craft came to rest in the sand on its skids, which were the landing gear for the world first airplane.
And until this very moment, I never had a use for such information
Funny. I’ve been looking forward to this day since the bicentennial of human flight back in the 1983. Now that it’s here, I don’t know how to mark the occasion. (I’m not current, out of work, and living in rainland, so going flying is out.)
So I’ll raise my coffee mug to the brothers Wright. Well done, and Thank You!
I think Johnny LA was referring to the bicentennial of the Montgolfiers’ first balloon flight in 1783 (flight, just not powered heavier-than-air flight).
Count me in as amazed at the progress we’ve seen in this hundred years.
The irony is that I’m now finishing up my flight training in a Cessna 152 - a design that goes back what, 50 years? It seems to me that general aviation is still fairly in touch with flying’s roots, whereas commercial and military flying are so far down the path of technology that it’s unrecognizable. GA still has a touch of magic in it. Strap into your buddy’s Aeronca Champ and buzz some trees…
Ditto cold and rainy here as well, so no flying for me. Also, it would interfere with my RotK viewing tonight.
Unfortunately it was also rainy down at Kitty Hawk today, putting a crimp in the plans to re-enact the Wright Brothers’ flight.
Makes me wonder, what other major milestones might we be marking by re-enactment? ultrafilter how might we re-enact modern phyiscs? In 2045, will we celebrate Hiroshima by nuking something else? In 2069, will we re-film the moon landing in Nevada?
Actually, steam powered heavier-than-air flight of an aeroplane has been around since 1848, and powered helicopter flight even longer than that. See my Teemings article at http://www.teemings.com/issue15/calmeacham.html
I don’t think anyone questions Stringfellow’s accomplishment (unlike a great many other claimants to early flight).
What the Wright brothers gave us was controlled, human-bearing powered heavier-than-air flight.
And I’m seconding Revtim! That, and I say this with the marvel of the technology (I hope to God it never happens) that we can put a “parcel” on target halfway around the world in a half-hour or so (ICBMs and such).
And this technology was being developed within the lifetime of anyone who was a middle aged adult during the Wright brother’s flight.
Man, what 100 years does.
Tripler
And to think, about 100 or so from now, we’re supposed to develop Warp drive. Wow! :eek:
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