A Century of Airplane Flight

And so it was one hundred years ago today that the Wright Brothers made the first heavier-than-air flight. Excuse me for being a little cynical toward the whole celebration. Don't get me wrong; I think aviation is a wonderful innovation, and perhaps the most spectacular and productive achievement of the twentieth century. But aviation has produced some negative by-products as well, and it would be unwise not to contemplate the sobering effect of these unintended consequences.

Commercial passenger aviation, particularly in the United States, leaves a good deal to be desired. Since the airlines were deregulated twenty-five years ago by a Democratic Congress with the blessing of a Democratic President (Carter), air travel has become an abysmal affair. The airlines have grown greedy over the years, sacrificing comfort for its passengers with stuffing as many seats as possible into their planes and forcing people into cramped, uncivilized environments where you're forced to spend a long trip in a tight spot - literally - and eat lousy food while a nondescript movie plays on the tiny video screen overhead - and you have to pay for headphones to hear the dialogue

Traveling by plane used to be as comfortable as traveling by train or ship still is (if you have the time to take either one) before airline deregulation allowed more flights with more passengers to congest our skies and make traveling more unpleasurable. I myself remember a flight from Newark to San Francisco where I felt cramped and crabby. I ws going to a big international stamp show in San Francisco, and on the plane I recognized a man who wrote for Linn's Stamp News who lived near my hometown. I would have loved to go over to his seat and strike up a conversation with him, but the tightness of the cabin made that all but impossible. The return flight was even worse, as I got stacked up over Newark due to bad weather for what seemed like an eternity.

And then of course there is the jet lag - having to readjust your body to a new time zone after a trip of three thousand miles. The airports themselves are a mess, with boarding rooms having all the ambiance of a seedy bus station and the runways on many airfields too short or too close together for anyone too feel safe during takeoff. And what happens when you get in the air? Statistically speaking, airplanes are the safest way to travel, but the airline industry has been rife with examples of avoiding safety regulations and allowing some rather grave aviation accidents to take place in this country. It's even worse on regional commuter airlines, where the planes are small and skittish and the repair records are questionable. Not to mention the way these airlines treat their own employees; as Michael Moore reported not to long ago, the pay for a pilot at American Airlines's American Eagle commuter subsidiary is $16,800 a year. And, as Moore said, you don't want someone making that little money worry about how he's going to pay his bills when he should be concentrating on getting you safely to his destination.

All of that pales, however, in comparison to the use of planes as merely another method of waging war. Aviation technology had improved so quickly after 1903 that the dogfights of World War I - and the exploits of the Red Baron, bomber Baron Manfred von Richtofen - became legendary for their viciousness. Then came World War II with Pearl Harbor and the Luftwaffe raids, the carpet bombing of Vietnam - what would Orville and Wilbur Wright have thought of today's fighter pilots dropping bombs on innocent civilians from thirty thousand feet in the air and returning to their bases safely and without much regret? Or the nineteen hijackers who, on September 11, 2001, commandeered four airliners and used them as missiles to slaughter three thousand people in the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history?

Yes, the airplane is a wonderful invention, and, in the best of circumstances, it's brought the world closer together. Still, one can't help but look at the disruption of civilization it's caused and wonder if maybe we were better off with the Wright Brothers sticking to the bicycle trade.