30. Flight: An Invention That Shrank the World

Wilbur and Orville would have laughed at the sight. The Boeing 747 squats on the factory floor, a fat-bellied, humpbacked behemoth weighing 400 tons. This beast? Fly? Not a chance, the Wright brothers could have told you.

In their day, both the notion of flight and the contraptions devised to achieve it were tentative things, prone to wavering, buckling and crashing.

The Wrights' historic first flight in December 1903 spanned 120 feet. Had they launched their aircraft at the back of the Boeing 747's economy section, they wouldn't have made it to first class.

But they got far enough. What the Wright brothers began on the windy dunes of Kitty Hawk, N.C., transformed the world. The history of flight is strictly a 20th century phenomenon, an extraordinary progression of technological advances crammed into a dizzyingly short time frame.

Aircraft changed the way wars are fought. They shrank the world so that now there's almost no place on Earth that can't be reached in less than a day from any other place. Aircraft designers have prodded developments in other spheres of technology, demanding constant advances in electronics, engines and lightweight materials. Flight paved the way for the space program and an escape from the planet.

Airplanes not only lifted people and packages, says Tom Crouch, senior curator of aeronautics at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum. They also carried our imagination aloft.

Humans' Vision Elevated

"The real impact was on our vision as a human species," Crouch says. "Before 1903 you heard, 'If God had meant for us to fly, he would have given us wings.' After 1903 people said, 'If humans can build a machine to take us into the air, what can't we do?'"

From the ancient Greeks' myth of Icarus to Leonardo da Vinci's sketches of helicopters, the idea of flight long taunted the human imagination, but the reality always seemed just out of reach.

"Not within a thousand years will man ever fly!" Wilbur Wright cried out in 1901, frustrated over the erratic behavior of a glider during a test flight.

He and his brother persevered, however, and their first successful day of powered, sustained and controlled flight set the pace of change for the century to come. On Dec. 17, 1903, after a first flight of 120 feet in 12 seconds, the 12-horsepower Wright Flyer made three more flights. The longest lasted nearly a minute and covered 852 feet.

The Wright brothers kept building upon their successes, joined by other inventors and air enthusiasts in America and Europe. By 1905 the Wrights had developed the first practical airplane, the Flyer 3, which in one flight stayed aloft for 33 minutes and traveled 20 miles.

In 1909, Frenchman Louis Bleriot flew across the English Channel and within two days received orders for more than 100 of his Model XI Monoplanes.

In 1911, American Cal Rodgers flew a Wright airplane across the United States in 84 days.

Air Power Altered War

If such stunts were inspiring, World War I put aviation to use in deadly earnest. Airplanes were employed at first for reconnaissance, but air battles soon followed as each side tried to shoot down the enemy's observation planes.

A rapid escalation of technology followed. Flying aces dueled in the clouds over France. German bombing raids on London, at first using Zeppelin airships and then giant biplanes with 138-foot wingspans, erased the distinction between soldier and civilian.

"It redefined the battlefield," Crouch says. "The airplane gave you the ability to project force over a distance and attack the enemy where he lived: factories, homes, cities."

After the war, barnstormers thrilled audiences across America, while adventurers kept breaking speed and distance records.

In May 1927, an airmail pilot named Charles Lindbergh made the first solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean, a distance of 3,610 miles in 33 hours. He took off in a fuel-heavy monoplane called the Spirit of St. Louis. He returned to a ticker-tape parade in New York City.

Amelia Earhart captured the world's heart and then broke it, first with her transatlantic solo flight in 1932, then with her disappearance over the Pacific on the last leg of an around-the-world flight in 1937.

If aircraft were testaments to human ingenuity, Earhart symbolized the dauntless spirit of those who flung themselves into the sky. Lines from her poem "Courage" explain what drove her and other aviation pioneers:

Courage is the price that Life exacts for granting peace,

The soul that knows it not, knows no release

From little things. . . .

From Adventure to Profit

Where Earhart found adventure, big business saw opportunities for profit and started to focus on how to move more people more efficiently through the air. A breakthrough in commercial aviation came in the late 1930s, when Douglas Aircraft's DC-3, with a cruising speed of 190 mph and a range of 800 miles, showed for the first time that an airplane could carry passengers and make money.

America's involvement in World War II began and ended with the airplane. In December 1941, Japanese warplanes attacking Pearl Harbor shook the United States out of its isolationism. Four years later, a Boeing B-29 SuperFortress called the Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. In between, the United States produced nearly 300,000 military aircraft, including the first practical helicopters.

After the war, jet and rocket engines took aircraft faster, farther and higher. Test pilot Chuck Yeager became the first man to travel faster than sound, hitting nearly 700 mph in a rocket-powered Bell X-1 during a flight in October 1947. Jet fighters proved themselves in combat during the Korean War. The Boeing 707, introduced in 1958, established jet airliners as a dominant force in passenger aviation.

In the 1960s, the X-15 rocket-propelled plane flew higher and faster than any other airplane in tests done by the Air Force and NASA. It hit 4,520 mph and soared high enough to earn its pilots astronaut's wings.

By then, however, the greatest glory in the skies was going to the space program. As the rocket race to the moon captured the public's attention, advances in atmosphere-bound aircraft started to focus on less flashy but no less significant achievements—making flight cleaner, cheaper and safer.

The Boeing 747, the world's largest commercial jetliner, is a prime example. It can carry more than 400 passengers and fly them 8,300 miles without refueling. More than 1,230 of the jumbo jets have been made since 1969, and they have carried 2.2 billion passengers.

"The 747 made intercontinental travel possible for the masses," says Boeing spokesman Gary Lesser.

Thirty years later, the enormous plane still impresses. The Boeing Co. assembles the jetliners in Everett, 30 miles north of Seattle, in a factory that the company claims is the world's largest building—98 acres under one roof. Painted on the concrete floor are roadways, regulated by stop signs and traveled by electric buggies, trucks and three-wheeled bicycles.

One recent day, Lesser was driving a visitor around the factory. He referred his guest to a fact sheet explaining that a 747 has 6 million parts, 171 miles of wiring and 5 miles of tubing. It contains 147,000 pounds of aluminum and has a tail that reaches 63 feet high, the equivalent of a six-story building.

The jetliner's normal operating weight is . . . well, Lesser hesitated on that statistic. "I don't know exactly," he confessed. "But whatever it is, it's big. When it comes to the 747, I like the word big. It's all big, big, big."

Amazement Survives the Routine

For Boeing or any airplane maker, today's digitized blueprints, computer simulations and fastidious engineering have eliminated the old seat-of-the-pants drama of early aircraft designs.

Yet there is still room for amazement. You can see it in the eyes of a child who presses her nose to the glass at the airport, watching jetliners dash down the runway and tilt skyward—the impossible made routine.

You can hear it from old hands such as Bill Sweetman, an aerospace writer who tracks the latest developments in secret aircraft.

What's the latest in aeronautical technology? Only a few privileged people know, Sweetman says. Many observers, including Sweetman, believe a supersonic aircraft known as Aurora is being tested at the U.S. government's top-secret Area 51 in Nevada.

Whether or not this cutting-edge aircraft is streaking across the cloudless desert sky—and the government isn't saying anything—it doesn't take "black budget" secrets to impress. Sweetman advises simply looking skyward, wherever you happen to be.

"I think what would most amaze somebody from 1903, if they were around today, would be that there are so many airplanes," he says. "They're as routine as trains were in the 19th century. They're flying everywhere."