Humans had gathered around fires for a hundred thousand years or more with little result. Other than the fire itself, of course. Fire represented an early adoption of technology. Fire is a natural process, but for humans to harness it, to use it to their advantage, that was something else.
With an unimaginable number of fires lit all over the world over all that time, just two men established a belief that would propel humanity into the heavens. The Montgolfier brothers, Joseph-Michel and Jacque-Étienne watched the smoke rise and surmised the smoke itself could be the secret to human flight.
They were wrong, of course. It was the heated air that lifted their balloons. Hot air being less dense and therefore lighter than colder air. But they were right, too. Flight was possible.
Their belief led to experimentation, which led to improved technology, which in turn caused both fear and fascination amongst the general public.
It was just 120 years later another set of brothers, these from the new world, in a state known both then and now as Ohio, that another belief took hold. The question lodged in their collective brains. If a lighter than air vehicle could fly, why not a heavier than air vehicle?
Just because nobody had successfully proven the case was no reason to discard the thought. Sure, neither brother had completed high school, but why should that hold them back? They had a belief, which bloomed into an idea, then became a physical machine. The brothers believed in their theories and experiments so deeply they put their lives on the line to prove the point.
The 1903 Wright Flyer is an iconic aircraft. It is a powerful symbol of the importance of the burgeoning industrial age. It famously completed four flights under the brother’s control on December 17, 1903. It’s longest flight of 852 feet was impressive, yet less than the length of the USS Gerald R. Ford – an aircraft carrier that clocks in at a length of 1,106 feet. But it was also the start of something very, very big.
For all the fanfare that fragile Flyer received, and deservedly so, it’s often lost in the telling that it flew on only one day. Its fame and impact have far exceeded its functional life.
A door was opened. Opportunity flowed from belief.
The Flyer was an experimental aircraft designed and flown by complete amateurs. That’s not an insult. It’s a statement of fact. From a traditional perspective neither Orville or Wilbur was well educated. Neither had an engineering degree or any proven record of scientific or technological achievement. Yet they designed and built a machine that would change the path and the future of humanity.
A machine that was frankly, barely functional. Underpowered, nearly uncontrollable in flight, and with absolutely no crashworthiness built into its design, the Flyer achieved its fame and met its fate on the sands of Kitty Hawk and Kill Devil Hill.
It lived and died in one day. Yet the legacy of the brothers and their testbed design reverberates to this day.
This morning, as is true of every morning, thousands of human beings woke up, got out of bed, and began to think about leaving this earth for a short time. To fly. These are not the people who plan on riding in the back of a sealed tube wondering which snacks might be available and worrying about making their connecting flights. These are the men and women who intend to take the controls, to set their sights on success, to pilot an aircraft in flight – because they believe.
Whether they are a student pilot with an empty logbook or an Airline Transport Pilot with tens of thousands of hours in flight, they share something unique and wonderful. They believe in themselves. They believe in the technology available to them. And whether their chosen mode of flight for today is a derivative of the Montgolfier’s gasbags, or Alberto Santos-Dumont’s various flying machines, or the Wright Brother’s toil, they have pushed aside self-imposed limitations to live a fuller, more robust life that includes flight.
Each of these individuals shares something in common, from the Montgolfier’s to you and me. We believe we can. So, we do. We accept the challenge to live on the periphery of human potential. Ours is a quest to experience life more fully with greater engagement. To literally take our destiny into our own hands by diving deeply into unfamiliar territory and learning to master the variables while keeping one eye firmly on being successful.
We, like those before us, believe. Initially we do not know. We merely believe. We have no experience, but we have faith that we can achieve great things by trying. There will be failures along the way. Bounced landings being the most visible and frustrating, perhaps. Yet, we will persevere. We will continue to try. Because we believe in ourselves.
It took 120 years to get from a floating bag of hot air to the airplane. It took half that to develop new technologies that successfully put humans on the surface of the moon. One day in the not so distant future there will be robots on rockets traveling to Mars. Not long after, there will be humans who follow with the intent of pushing back the limits of human experience while blazing a trail into new frontiers.
At that same moment in time, some of us will be 1,000 feet AGL in an airplane built while Orville Wright still walked the Earth. Our speed may be less, our altitude may be nowhere near as high, our destination may be no more ambitious than setting back down in the same place we departed an hour before. But because we believed we could, we did. And that’s something truly worth celebrating.
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