An intellectual wandering

I suspect every pilot alive has ruminated on the old saw about an elementary school teacher admonishing a daydreaming student: “You’ll never earn a living by staring out the window.”

This brings to mind the famous quote from John Lennon’s Aunt Mimi: “The guitar’s all right, John, but you’ll never earn your living by it.”

Both warnings have turned out to be wrong. Spectacularly wrong. And both for the same reason: They ignore the transformative power of imagination.

Walt Disney and his Imagineers, on the other hand, they got it right.

When my kids were small we’d take them to DisneyWorld from time to time. Perhaps my favorite memory from that time involved the Journey into Imagination with Figment. Figment is a furry little beast who encouraged kids of all ages to daydream, to conceptualize scenarios and invent activities in their minds, to be creative.

“Heavier than air flying machines are impossible,” said Lord William Thomson Kelvin in 1895. Only four years later two largely self-educated boys from Ohio decided to put that claim to the test. Less than a decade after Lord Kelvin’s pronouncement, they proved him wrong on the beaches of North Carolina.

Imagination, experimentation, and tenacity won out. As it so often does. It makes one wonder why so many of us persist in our belief that the technological challenges of life are insoluble.

Because of its incredible pace of improvement, aviation is perhaps the best example of how the impossible becomes possible. And not always because governments throw heaping helpings of money at the issue.

Often, the solutions to problems, the major advancements in technology, come from shade-tree mechanics. Nut jobs working in barns and garages and hangars and lofts have a long history of coming up with remarkable inventions that are ultimately embraced by the world at large.

Yet that doesn’t keep us from disparaging the oddballs among us. While proof may be in the pudding, negativity and disbelief reign supreme in the human psyche.

The Wrights flew, but their control system of wing warping was impractical. It was a flawed first-generation solution. It wasn’t long before creative minds across the globe began to play with the idea in an effort to improve on their creation.

History suggests it was Robert Esnault-Pelterie who pioneered the first workable ailerons. His were suspended between the upper and lower wings, an independent but functional improvement to wing warping.

After seeing the Wrights fly in France, Henri Farman designed, built, and flew the first fully recognizable ailerons. His were attached to the outboard trailing edges of the wings. As ours are today.

Daydreaming wins again.

In the quest to go higher, faster, carry more load, and become eminently more efficient, there may be no more obvious example than the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company. Its JN-4 Jenny was an anemic but popular trainer of the World War I era. Originally produced with a 90-horsepower Curtiss OX-5 engine, the lumbering Jenny weighed nearly a ton. It flew, but it couldn’t maintain altitude in a turn.

Tweaks to the powerplant, the structure, and the relatively new idea of shedding drag from external bracing led the company to produce a more capable variant of the Jenny.

Innovation was so profoundly successful that same company found itself pushing P-40 Warhawks out the door only two decades after the Jenny waddled onto the grass fields of the day.

Suddenly, and it certainly did feel sudden to the world at large, Curtiss was producing an airplane that could fly to 30,000 feet. Maximum speeds tripled to better than 350 mph, while range extended to well over 800 miles.

The airplane had become a proven machine capable of covering ground quickly, carrying a truly useful load, and doing actual work that had been unimaginable just a few years before.

Unimaginable to those who were loath to look out the window, to daydream, to ask themselves “What if…”

A couple decades later Kelly Johnson and his team of engineers at the Skunk Works found a way to power a knife-edged SR-71 to the edge of space at speeds exceeding Mach 3.

Innovation leads to innovation. Whenever a crank with a drawing board and a wrench finds a newer, better, more capable way of doing things, progress ensues. Achieving the impossible opens to the door to pondering new problems. Solving those problems leads to amazing feats.

A friend of mine, along with three friends of his, recently flew commercial to Oregon. They took delivery of two Van’s RV-12s to bring home for a new flight school firing up operations in Florida. The trip home took only 3 days.

Imagine, two Light Sport Aircraft burning as little as 4 gallons an hour of unleaded fuel made their way from the Northwest corner of America to the Southeast peninsula utilizing GPS navigation, both hand flying and using the wonders of autopilot technology. The four young men involved thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

An event that was absolutely impossible 100 years ago is now practical and safe. The first passenger service to make such a trip cost more than $6,000, adjusted for inflation. The RVs made the trip spending roughly $700 for fuel. That’s just $350 per occupant.

So, when we see our young ones gazing out the window seemingly disconnected from what’s going on in the room they’re sitting in, perhaps we should replace the traditional statement of warning with a question of real significance.

“What are you thinking about?” might be a more appropriate response.

After all, the whole world and everything in it lies on the opposite side of that glass. The answers we receive may be less than compelling most of the time. But now and then imaginative wanderings of a fledgling Glenn Curtiss, or Kelly Johnson, or Dick VanGrunsven might just surprise us.