Monday, Lafayette, Indiana

It was on this day in 1903 that brothers Orville & Wilbur Wright flew their homemade airplane on the coast of North Carolina. While there were other engineers around the world who had made and flown machines, the Wrights developed in the unique cockpit controls that allowed the machine to be successfully piloted. The core techniques they developed for fixed wing aircraft are still used today.

The Wright Brother’s achievement was stunning since it enabled flight by machines that were heavier than air. Until their work at the turn of the last century, along with other aeronautical inventors in Europe, this notion seemed absurd.

While younger brother Wilbur died in 1912 at 45 years old, Orville lived until 1948 and saw the evolution of his invention into its modern military and commercial uses. Born and raised in the Richmond, Indiana and Dayton, Ohio, neither brother finished high school. They became financially successful as printers and news publishers and later cashed in on the growing bicycle craze. They used their work building and repairing bicycles and small motors as the foundation of their later work on flight.

The Fear of Flying

The same suspicions that accompanied the whole notion of flight - how can something heavier than air get off the ground? - is at the root of our feelings today. As hundreds of millions of people fly each year, they sit in their seats and cope with this strange human phenomenon in one of two ways:

1. Some simply endure their anxiety, hyper aware that they at the complete mercy of the pilots and mechanics, trusting that the metal monster will take them safely to where they are risking their lives to go.

2. Others cope by simply shutting out their feelings of helplessness, denying the shocking decision they have made putting their lives into the hands of others at the controls.

However you feel when on a plane, the reality remains the same - hundreds of tons of steel leave the ground for reasons understood by God and his little creature engineers, but not by me. Placing myself at the mercy of others, surrendering the control I feel when I drive, for instance, is something to which I have never fully adjusted.

So this past week, with the horrible weather of ice and snow and wind, I foolishly opted to avoid my flight and chose to drive home to Indiana from the East Coast. I realize that I was putting myself at far greater statistical risk of injury and death on the highway. But alas,

I was at the wheel!
I understood what was making the car go!
I was in control!

At least that is my illusion - an illusion, I must admit, that is every bit as preposterous as the idea of a flying machine itself.