Aviation’s open-ended voyage

In the spring of 1913, Marcel Proust mourned the death of Alfred Agostinelli, his former chauffeur and lover, who drowned off Monte Carlo after the one-man plane he was flying plunged into the sea when a wingtip caught the water on a low turn. In “In Search of Lost Time,” Proust modeled his narrator’s great love, Albertine, a closeted lesbian who dies in a riding accident, on Agostinelli. Yet the real-life circumstances of his friend’s death did not deter Proust from praising in his epic novel the capacity of flying machines to lift the human spirit: “The airplanes which a few hours earlier I had seen, like insects, as brown dots upon the surface of the blue evening, now passed like luminous fire-ships through the darkness of the night.... And perhaps the greatest impression of beauty that these human shooting stars made us feel came simply from their forcing us to look at the sky, towards which normally we so seldom raise our eyes.”

Today, Sept. 11 jitters notwithstanding, most adults take airplanes for granted. In the United States alone, there are 90,700 plane flights each day. In “Wings: A History of Aviation, From Kites to the Space Age,” Tom D. Crouch, a senior curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum and one of the foremost historians of aviation, traces the evolution of human flight from our ancient envy of birds -- “The natural function of a wing,” Plato said, “is to carry that which is heavy up to the place where dwells the race of gods” -- to travel to other worlds. Crouch is methodical in his approach and he worries that the ending of his book will not come as a surprise. “Most readers will probably approach this story with an unconscious sense of the inevitability of things,” he cautions in the prologue. “The history of flight seems to have followed a predestined trajectory from the sands of Kitty Hawk, across the Atlantic, around the world, through the sound barrier, and onto the Moon. I hope that this telling of the tale of the airplane carries with it a sense that events did not have to transpire as they did.” In this hope he admirably succeeds.

On Dec. 17, 1903, two bicycle repairmen from Dayton, Ohio, flew above the shores of Kill Devil Hills, four miles south of Kitty Hawk, N.C. Wilbur and Orville Wright took turns piloting their wood-framed, wire-braced, fabric-covered craft for four short hops across the sand, with the last hop -- 852 feet in 59 seconds -- the longest. Further experimentation came to a halt when a gust of wind flipped the plane over on the ground, the crankcase shattered and the engine jerked loose. “The active career of the 1903 Wright airplane was at the end,” Crouch writes. “It had spent less than two minutes in the air.”

The Wrights recognized the significance of their making the world’s first, albeit brief, controlled flights, but the actual experience was not as thrilling as their dreams of flying. And the brothers certainly did not foresee what their invention would become. Even six years later, Wilbur ruled out the possibility of future transatlantic flights -- “No airship will ever fly from New York to Paris” -- and dismissed the prospect of planes hauling cargo. Orville told a reporter that the airplane would never “take the place of trains or steamships for the carrying of passengers.” In the short run, they were right. A quarter-century would pass before the plane proved its utility beyond war.

One of the book’s strengths is that it explores aeronautical dead ends as well as the developments and breakthroughs that led to the airplane as we know it today. “Pure enthusiasm sometimes overwhelms the cool judgment of the technician,” Crouch notes, citing the zeppelin as a case in point: “The sight of aircraft seven football fields long cruising majestically across the sky at an altitude of a thousand feet and a speed of less than 100 mph was never to be forgotten.” Such giant airships made regular passenger flights between German towns long before planes did. They also had the dubious distinction of making the first airstrikes in World War I, when three days into the conflict, on Aug. 6, 1914, zeppelins bombed French fortifications at Liege.

In July 1919, the British zeppelin R 34, powered by five 250-horsepower engines, became the first aircraft to cross the Atlantic, land and return. The initial leg, from East Fortune, England to Mineola, New York, took 4 days, 12 hours and 12 minutes, and enough fuel remained to keep the airship aloft two more hours. With the wind at its back, the zeppelin’s return trip was much faster. Throughout the 1920s, only dirigibles were capable of transporting passengers and cargo intercontinental distances, although their safety record was atrocious long before the Hindenburg tragedy. On Oct. 4, 1930, for example, R 101, the pride of the British airship fleet, embarked on a highly publicized flight to India and crashed a few hours later into a French hillside, killing 48 people.

Crouch describes how enthusiasm for dirigibles spread even to America. In the mid-1920s, the U.S. Navy purchased a German zeppelin and pressed the renamed USS Los Angeles into service for 4,180 hours over a 15-year period -- long a record for a lighter-than-air craft. Naval strategists knew that the zeppelin was good for military reconnaissance but, being slow and bulky, was vulnerable to enemy fire. Their plan was to turn the airship into a flying aircraft carrier. The zeppelin, which could hide at great heights above the clouds, would be refitted with a “trapeze bar,” a platform from which a fighter plane could take off, surprise the enemy and return.

In the mid-1930s, at a time when the United States had a monopoly on the world’s supply of helium, all U.S. airships were filled with inert helium, not flammable hydrogen. Those that crashed did not burn, writes Crouch. Germany, believing that the United States would refuse to sell it precious helium, filled its new luxury airship Hindenburg with hydrogen. In 1936, the airship made regular trips across the Atlantic, each time ferrying as many as 72 paying customers and 40 crew members. On May 6, 1937, as it approached its landing spot in Lakehurst, N.J., the Hindenburg caught fire and burned, killing 35 of the 97 people on board and abruptly ending the romantic age of the airship.

If there is a fault with “Wings,” it is that Crouch has sacrificed narrative and colorful detail to include as much of the complex history of human flight as possible. In his earlier works, “A Dream of Wings: Americans and the Airplane, 1875-1905” and “The Bishop’s Boys: A Life of Wilbur and Orville Wright” (a much more compelling and better-researched biography than the plethora of new books on the brothers that have been published in this centennial year of their first flight), he was a more engaging storyteller. Although “Wings” weighs in at a hefty 726 pages, Crouch makes clear from the outset that his approach to this vast subject is interpretive, not comprehensive: “Those in search of encyclopedic coverage will be sorely disappointed. I offer an aerial photograph of the forest, not a checklist of the individual trees.”

Fair enough, but readers would be better served had Crouch zoomed in for a close-up view of a tree or two.