The Miracle of Flight

For thousands of years, man imagined flight, but the goal of powered flight was achieved only a hundred years ago. By the time that my plane was built, forty- some years later, there wasn't much novelty left to the concept of aviation. Things like higher, faster, and more dependable were awaiting further refinement, but wartime production had shown that airplanes were mass- production items, possessing no more of a soul than a car or a typewriter.

Perhaps the war was the death knell for popular aviation. In its infancy and adolescence, through the 1930s, aviation was a fixture in most everyone's imagination. Back then it was new, it was adventurous and exciting, but by war's end, it had become routine. It was just another means to an end, just another service offered the public.

This notion caught many people by surprise. People who still held the romance of flight in their hearts expected that every village would have an airstrip, and that thousands of pilots would come home and buy their own airplanes. The guys did indeed come home, but they got married and raised families. They bought houses and cars, and forgot about flying.

When it was new, my Commonwealth Skyranger was fancy for its times, standing above most other planes that were offered into the anticipated post- war aviation boom. While many other pilots still started their new planes by flipping the propeller, the Commonwealth pilot had an electric starter. He had broadcloth upholstery and fancy trimmings. He had lights for night flying, and had an option to do instrument flight too.

Today my plane is just another sack of sticks; little pieces of this-n-that inside a fabric skin. It was designed in 1941 to carry two average sized people, but today it is too small. Even if it was in showroom condition the interior and the instrumentation would today be judged as spartan, but the years have not treated it well. For me though, anything more than stick, rudder, and throttle detracts from the pleasures of flyin' .

So it was that I was preparing for a flight two weeks ago, and I made a pass through the house to round up my "stuff". I put the digital camera in one pocket and a cel phone in another. I was wearing my fifteen dollar LCD watch, and the Wal- Mart variety GPS was already in the plane, somewhere in the baggage pouch behind the seat.

For a moment I pictured the well- heeled owner of a new Commonwealth in June of 1946, standing next to his plane and regarding the electronic stuff that I routinely carry around. What would he think of a watch that keeps time within seconds a year, has no moving parts, and is cheap as dirt? At a time when transistors were a laboratory curiosity, what would he think about a camera with no moving parts and no film, which can capture scores of pictures on a ... slice of silicon ?

In 1946, a home or office which had a standard- issue black desk telephone was upscale. Could he believe that today "everyone" would carry a miniature phone that works from anywhere, including a country hayfield? How could he fathom that a galaxy of GPS satellites would today orbit the earth and provide position, speed, and direction information to everyone from fishermen to fighter pilots?

If he could understand that all these things would be possible, could he believe that they would be sold in stores that he would think of as "five- and- dimes"? The pace of technology is moving ahead so quickly that this year's inventions were only imagined last year.

There is much to be romanticized about the "good old days" and perhaps much to agonize for the future. As I drove to the airport that day though, I knew that I would participate in a miracle, but that it would have nothing to do with flight.