Flight

Abstract

© Patrick Luiz Sullivan De Oliveira Published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License The history of flight presents a seemingly straightforward linear narrative. Before the eighteenth century, humans could only aspire to fly—an unfulfillment that promoted a rich mythology in antiquity that includes, most famously, the Hellenic warning against Icarian hubris. What followed were centuries of tinkering by eccentric geniuses such as Leonardo da Vinci—experiments that proved practically unfeasible but nevertheless indicated a rationalization of the aerial milieu. Then, in 1783, the invention of the hot-air balloon by the Montgolfier brothers in France allowed humans to ascend into the sky for the first time. However, this form of flight proved to be a dead end, for people soon realized it was not possible to steer a balloon. The real triumph, then, came only on December 17, 1903, when Wilbur and Orville Wright flew the heavier-than-air Flyer above the sand dunes of Kitty Hawk. This event, according to the usual narrative, marked the “invention of the aerial age” (as the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum labeled its exhibit on the Wright brothers). In the ensuing decades, aviation took the world by storm—first with the pre-war meets, then with the military uses of the airplane during World War I, then with the heroic transatlantic flights and raids in the interwar years. World War II marked another turning point, inaugurating not only new forms of aerial warfare and destruction, but also laying the foundations for the age of industrialized mass flight that would soon follow. As such, while for millennia human flight remained the stuff of myths, in just over a century it progressed from fantastic accomplishment to mundane experience. Seen from this perspective, the history of flight neatly maps on to the commonplace narrative of modernity as the triumph over nature and the disenchantment of the world.