The Hundred-Year High

Years ago, on a camping trip to the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park with a group of schoolchildren, I built a model glider of balsa and paper. Its wings spanned 3 feet or so. Across the table from me, another parent busied herself stuffing and mounting a seabird whose carcass had been found on the shore of the nearby Salton Sea. The aim of both activities was to entertain and instruct the children, whose average age was about 6, during the hot midday “down time.” The taxidermy project outdrew the glider. I have to admit that seeing a dead body brought back to a semblance of life with wire and cotton is more arresting than watching glue dry on balsa wood.

But then evening came. The air was almost still. I had made a few test flights of the glider to adjust its balance; now I climbed the hill beside the campsite, holding my handiwork gingerly at arm’s length, clear of the boulders and the cactus. Some children followed me, always ready for a good climb. The majority watched from below as I tested the breeze and then launched the glider away from the hillside and upwind, toward the canyon, hoping that it would turn away from the wind and over the open valley.

It did. Tremulous, bowing to passing gusts and then righting itself, it traced a wide arc, its translucent yellow skin bright in the dusky blue of the evening air. The crowd of children below followed it, rushing and swerving in unison like a school of fish. Their delighted cries floated up to me. Slowly it settled; but each time it seemed in danger of snagging the top of a creosote bush a providential thermal would appear and it would balloon upward. The chorus of voices rose with it. Did it fly for 30 seconds? Forty-five? A minute? It was impossible to tell. Its flight commanded absolute attention; there was no time for time.

Since I was a child myself, I have never stopped feeling that “lonely impulse of delight,” as the Irish poet William Butler Yeats called it, on seeing airplanes fly. It is as if the invisible air breathes a soul into an inanimate thing and gives it, for a little while, consciousness and intention. But that is too rational, too convenient a formulation; it does not quite capture the instantaneous, thoughtless, rapturous feeling that makes me catch my breath when I see an airplane, especially a glider, wheeling on the wind. I suppose it is some glowing ember of that feeling that made Yeats’ Irish airman join, and die in, the Royal Flying Corps during World War I, and that caused me, without my ever quite intending it, to make a 40-year career of flying and writing about airplanes.

On this 100th anniversary of powered flight, we aviation writers are called upon to reflect in edifying ways upon the accomplishments of the Wright brothers. Inevitably, in the age of irony, some demystification has been the result. The brothers turn out not to have been a single, joined-at-the-hip entity, but two quite different men, one of whom, Wilbur, was the guiding genius of their enterprise, although it was Orville who made the milestone first flight. They were litigious; in fact, they managed to dissipate some of the glory of their technical achievements in greedy, shortsighted and ignoble quarrels over who “owned” human flight. It was as if Michelangelo, after painting the Sistine Chapel, had stood at the door demanding a hefty fee to allow people to come in and see it.

It has been necessary to clarify the exact boundaries of what the Wrights accomplished. They did not “invent the airplane.” That had been done a century earlier by an Englishman, George Cayley, who seems to have been the first to understand, and correctly explain, exactly what was required to make a heavier-than-air object fly, and to build gliders embodying what is today recognized as the “correct” configuration for an airplane.

Nor were the Wrights the first to fly. The German Otto Lilienthal, like Wilbur Wright a rigorously systematic and scientific thinker, had made more than 1,000 hang-glider flights, beginning in the early 1890s. It’s not even clear that they were the first to make a powered flight; many of the nations of Europe, at least one of South America and, for that matter, the Texas town of Pittsburg all have their own candidates for that distinction. Nor did the Wright brothers create the template for subsequent airplanes; in fact, most of the design features of their Flyers ended up in the wastebasket as European experimenters, unhampered by lawsuits, raced ahead of the Americans.

What the Wrights did accomplish was indisputable, repeatable, controllable, reasonably safe powered flight. When Wilbur took a Flyer to Europe in 1908, five years after the famous day at Kitty Hawk, his utter mastery of “aerial navigation” stunned the Europeans, who by then were flying as well but had not yet mastered turning. “Nous sommes battus,” Leon Delagrange, a French airman, told a reporter after seeing Wilbur execute a simple figure-eight. “We are beaten.”

The Wright Flyers, large airplanes and very light, still had that fluff-in-the-wind feeling of model gliders. Many old photos of early planes in flight show men running along after them (like Wilbur beside the wingtip of the Flyer in the familiar and beautiful photo of the first flight), or standing nearby in attitudes of arrested wonderment as an odd-looking contraption wafts past. But aeronautics progressed extremely quickly, and by 1930 racing seaplanes were reaching speeds of more than 400 mph.

As airplanes became more efficient at both transport and mayhem, their magic faded. It is difficult today to feel much emotion as 747s, arriving one after another, ponderously ply the downwind leg of LAX. The Christmas gift the Wrights gave us a century ago is like the shiny sleigh bell of Chris Van Allsburg’s story “The Polar Express.” Most people, leaving childhood behind, have ceased to hear its transcendent music. But though I’ve grown old, the bell still rings for me.