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At the

turn of the 20th century

in Dayton, Ohio,

Hawthorne Street looked

much as it does today.

Men and women are still living

who remember how in the years 1900, 1901, 1902, 1903

the quiet, slow spoken Wright brothers came

walking down Hawthorne

back again from their journeys to Kittyhawk.

And how with that bent, alert,

probing way of theirs,

they strode past the homes of Vance, the harness maker,

Pahu the stonecutter,

Wellborn, the wagon maker.

Wolfram the carriage trimmer.

Year after year, they came quietly home

to number seven, Hawthorne Street.

But once within the house

reserve left them.

With their father, Bishop Milton Wright,

their sister, Katherine, or the young girl

Carrie Grumbach, listening unobtrusively,

the Wright brothers studied aloud,

discussed exhaustively,

argued in detail,

and at

last conceived the principles that were to open the skies

to the navigation of men.

Around the corner

from Hawthorne on Fourth Street,

Orville and Wilbur Wright tested

not only their ideas,

but they examined the theories of other men

who had explored the possibilities of flight.

Cayley. Lilienthal.

Chanute.

Langley.

The Wrights devised

methods of measuring the accuracy

of aeronautical theories, including their own.

The home was their discussion hall,

the shop, their laboratory.

Both today are gone from Dayton

moved as monuments to the Wright memory,

to the museum at Greenfield Village and Dearborn

Discussion Hall

laboratory and testing devices

such as their first wind tunnel had their plates.

But the Wrights at once had recognized

an axiom of aviation that still endures.

Proof must come in the air.

On this windswept beach

in 1900, 1901, and 1902

They tested gliders they had built.

They taught themselves

to be pilots of a high order.

They were critical men,

but at last

their 1902 model pleased them.

They flew it farther and with better control

than any other glider that man had ever devised.

They came back

from Kitty Hawk in 1902 with a knowledge

that they had solved flight’s

paramount secret: control.

And in the spring of 1903

they designed the four

cylinder engine and fashioned two propellers.

When they next went to Kitty Hawk,

they flew.

On December

17th, 1903,

Orville and Wilbur Wright made man's first

four controled flights in a powered airplane.

That day,

they lifted the world into a new dimension.

What the Wrights had

achieved at Kitty Hawk barely evoked

passing attention in a nation whose people were absorbed

with the problems of a dynamic new age.

There were other, less celestial wonders closer

at hand, the automobile,

the telephone.

The motion picture.

But at number seven,

Hawthorne Street, December 17th, 1903

was a momentous day.

The young girl who was then

the Wright’s housekeeper, Carrie Grumbach remembers.

I remember the telegram when it’d come

that they had flown,

that they had done what they said they would do.

They always did as they had planned.

The telegram from Kitty Hawk

had a special significance for the mechanic

who worked in the Wright's bicycle shop, Charlie Taylor.

Of course, I was

greatly pleased to know

that it had been accomplished, but at that time

there didn't seem to be

anything wonderful at that.

I started on repairing bicycles back in,

in the 80s.

And then I later

went to Dayton

and built bicycles.

for the,

Stoddard Manufacturing Company.

And they were just

starting up in the bicycle business,

and I-

I got acquainted with the Wrights

and I would build bicycles for them.

I did all the repair work

while they went down

to Kitty Hawk to,

try out their gliders.

Well, I don't know.

All I needed was power to keep on flying.

I then went on to design the motor.

I made all the different parts

in the motor, I even made

the crankshaft.

I made it out of a solid

block of steel.

About 32in long,

six inches wide, an inch and 5/8

thick.

Cut it right

out of the solid block by drilling holes

and knocking large pieces out of it.

And then, then

turning it up in a lathe,

a motor itself.

From the time I started to, when

I had it ready for a test

was six weeks.

50 years ago, I can remember as

though it was yesterday almost.

There was not a complete indifference

to the Wright’s discovery.

A small group of Americans

were laboring to further the art.

And in Europe, where the airplane's

military potential was quickly realized.

A fresh wave of enthusiasm for aviation

followed the Wright success.

In France

Blériot, Farman and Brique were flying

airplanes of their own design.

The Englishman Corry

and the Brazilian Santos Dumont,

most of whose experiments

took place in France,

also captured the imagination

of Europe with successful flights.

The Wright had offered to demonstrate their airplane

to the United States Army shortly

after their first successful flights.

The Army declined,

preferring to develop

its small fleet of balloons as an air arm.

Oddly, it was a young balloonist

lieutenant of the Army, who finally was instrumental

in obtaining a chance for the Wrights and their airplane.

Frank P. Lahm.

After four long years of failing to recognize the Wrights.

Finally, in December of

1907, the Board

of Ordnance and Fortification

granted an interview

to Wilbur.

At once he inspired their confidence.

This led to a contract

in February of 1908

between the Wright brothers

and the Signal Corps,

in which they agreed to furnish an airplane

that would fly 40 miles an hour

carry two persons

remain in the air for one hour,

and arranged surely,

It was to have some kind of a device

by which, in case the motor stopped,

it could be landed without crashing.

In the summer of 1908,

Orville Wright brought to Fort Meyer, Virginia,

the airplane that was to fill

the specifications of the contract.

Day after day

we watched him fly around

and around the field in his tuning up flights.

And finally, on the 9th of September,

he broke the world record by staying in the air

for over one hour.

On landing, he came to me and said,

would you like to go up?

You can guess my answer.

And I made my first flight

in an airplane that day with Orville Wright.

Six minutes and 40 seconds.

Lieutenant Lahm became the first military officer

ever to fly in an airplane.

Eight days later, tragedy

struck. On a flight at Fort Myer,

Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge was killed.

Orville Wright injured. Shocked but not deterred,

both the Army and the Wrights moved

to improve the airplane.

In the summer of 1909,

both Wilbur and Orville Wright

came to Fort Myer, this time

with a new airplane.

It fulfilled the specifications,

including an hour's flight,

which is my good fortune to ride

with Orville for an hour and 12 minutes.

Another young Army lieutenant,

Benjamin Foulois, had a chance to fly

in the right plane at Fort Myer.

On the day following the endurance test

with Orville Wright and,

Lieutenant Lahm,

Orville

with a quiet little grin on his face

invited me to be his guest

on the crucial

and final cross-country

and speed tests.

The grin on all those faces

for my benefit,

particularly as I had been responsible

for laying out the course between Fort

Meyer and Alexandria, Virginia.

And there was not a landing field on the entire

Out- or homebound

course except Fort Meyer

Drill ground.

On July 30th,

we took off on the final

cross-country and speed test.

Shortly after, we straightened out

on the course for Alexandria.

Orville with the same little grin on his face,

told me that,

if he had to land

anywhere on the route

that he'd pick out the thickest clump of trees

he could find and land on top of them.

Fortunately, the little

engine that we had at the time

carried us all the way through

without any difficulty,

and we finally landed

back at Fort Meyer Drill ground

with three world records.

Cross-country, ten miles,

altitude 600ft

and speed 42.5 miles an hour.

The United States Army had an airplane.

The need now was for pilots.

There in the fall of 1909

under Wilbur Wright, struck

A Lieutenant F.D. Humphreys

Some U.S. engineers and myself.

We're taught to fly at the end

of some three hours.

We're soloed

and told we were pilots.

So in 1909, the military airplane

was mated to the military pilot.

Meanwhile,

all over the world,

aviation pioneers, encouraged by the Wright

brothers’ flights were hard at work.

The principles of flight

were now widely known, and designers

were applying them to many types of aircraft.

Glenn Curtiss, Glenn

Martin, and the Canadian J.A.D.

McCurdy were designing and flying

airplanes in competition

and for exhibition. In Europe,

the airplanes of Blériot, Pollum,

Farman, and de Havilland were demonstrating

obvious advances in both speed and range.

And in Russia, Igor Sikorsky

was taking his first steps into the age of flight.

And I remember very, very well the early,

interesting period in

France in 1909 and 1910.

And the very first attempts

were made to push aviation

from the purely

original experimental

flying to some kind of,

successful

practical achievement.

I have seen Blériot

coming in the same factory to purchase his motor,

and which a few months later

he crossed the English Channel.

At that time, I had my share of,

failures

with the first helicopter,

which was a flying machine,

only it couldn't fly.

Glenn Martin remembers

an episode of his pioneering days.

I've just been reading

an old postcard

sent by our family

doctor to my mother

dated September 30th, 1910.

This is at a time when I just began

to leave the ground in a flying machine

And it says, for heaven's sake,

if you have any influence

with that wild eyed,

hallucinated young man,

call him off before he is killed.

Have him devote

his energies to a substantial,

feasible and profitable pursuit,

leaving dreaming

to the professional dreamers. - For a dreamer,

Glenn Martin was attracting a remarkable group

of clear thinking young designers as workmen.

The first to join him was Donald Douglas.

I guess I must be getting old,

because somehow.

It becomes

fun to reminisce.

Well.

My first memory of things

in aviation

was seeing

the first Wright airplane

demonstrated for the Signal

Corps in 1908 at,

Fort Myers, outside of Washington.

So I took the streetcar and one thing

and another and got up to Fort Myers.

Well, there she

was, as I had seen a picture of the old Wright

pusher,

and there were Wilbur

and Orville.

There

was that old launching device

that kind of looked like a guillotine.

And they had the airplane perched up at the

starting part of the track, and the weight.

All ready to go.

I remember well, I believe it

was Wilbur

going out

and holding up a bit of dust.

And dropping it to see that there wasn't a bit of wind.

And then, as I recall, it was

Wilbur that got into the machine.

Well, I guess it was Colonel Lahm

they pulled the old latch

and down this little wooden track

it went with those funny old props

that ran around at apparently a pretty slow speed.

And off she went.

One of the first pilots

was Roy Knabenshue, who was a balloonist

even before he became an airplane pilot.

Gentlemen, I'm finding out

right back of the

pilot was Walter Brookins.

Walter was a great pilot.

His judgment was uncanny,

but he was very temperamental.

As a matter of fact, he and Arch Hoxsey and Ralph

Johnson was the three

best pilots

that they Wright Company had,

and each one

tried to outdo the other.

My friend Dick Ferris

remarked to me one time

he said, I

have been an impresario.

I have handled actors

and prima donnas.

But he says these

aviators, starting

where are the other fellow leaves off?

And he says it's impossible to do anything with them.

The ambitions of some designers went far

beyond their skills.

As Igor Sikorsky has said,

In the history of aviation,

there have been many contraptions

which, to the good fortune of their inventors,

failed to fly.

Inventors of a higher skill

sometimes were deadly serious

in demonstrating the utility man

could expect from the airplane.

Lawrence Sperry, whose contributions

to the aircraft instrument field were momentous,

puts a pre-war aircraft

through its paces.

All this permitted,

however, often it seemed to lack direction,

was contributing in one way

or another to the growth of aviation.

The airplane was growing

cleaner in design,

its horsepower was more

dependable.

The disparaging term aeronaut

was giving way to aviator, a term of respect.

Aviation was

emerging as a science.

A pioneer aeronautical engineer

and educator, Doctor Jerome Hunsaker.

Professional education

in aeronautical engineering

began in this country

at MIT in the winter of 1913/14.

This course was started

by president McLaurin.

Borrowing me

from the Navy Department

and supplying me with one assistant

as staff

who was a recent graduate

in mechanical engineering, Donald Douglas,

from whom more was to be heard.

The pusher engine of early planes

had been replaced by the tractor

engine installations, which allowed

higher speeds.

The Wrights were forseeing these helpful

aircraft devices

and other inventors, such as Elmer Sperry,

were inventing and refining them.

Here, a Curtiss seaplane flies with the early Sperry

automatic pilot.

Almost

without exception, in the first decade

of the airplane, the designers were pilots.

They built, tested, and flew their own designs,

Wrights, Blériot, Santos-Dumont,

Curtiss, Ro, Sikorsky, de Havilland and Martin

at Glenn Martin's,

a band of engineers and craftsmen

had gathered together whose names and time

would be synonymous with aircraft designs of world

rank.

Donald Douglas, James H.

Dutch Kindelberger,

Lawrence Larry Bell, Alan

Lockheed, John

Northrop.

The United States was

the cradle of flight.

Inventors

of a high order had appeared.

Our pilots were unmatched.

First rate designers emerged.

Brilliant men specialized in the components

of the airplane.

But as a pioneer who specialized in

aircraft horsepower,

Frederick B Rentschler summarizes.

Prior to World War I,

our most important contribution

to aviation is a flight

from the Wright Brothers.

From December, 1909

to March

1911, 13 months, the entire United States

Air Force consisted of one officer,

myself,

one civilian mechanic,

eight enlisted men, and one airplane.

The government at that time wasn't

very keen about turning money loose for flying.

I had, the great appropriation

of $150 allotted to me

to take care of the airplane for the entire year

in 1910. January 1910.

Chief signal officer

directed me to proceed to the word Sam.

Houston, Texas.

To teach myself how to fly.

On March

2nd, I made four flights, three

good, one bad.

The last one,

I cracked up and put the plane in the shop

for about ten days.

After each

crack up, I used to sit down

and try to puzzle out what had happened.

Then I’d write to the Wright brothers

and tell them all that I thought

had happened.

They’d proceed to write back

and tell me what I ought to have done.

In other words, I expect

I'm about the only man living today

who learned to fly by correspondence.

Two air minded young lieutenants shortly

joined general Foulois the one man Air Force.

They were Hap Arnold

and T. Dewitt Milling.

Looking back 42 years ago

to March 1911,

the month

in which General Arnold and myself were ordered to

Dayton to learn to fly with the Wright brothers,

and to think of the

plane that we used at that time,

and see the advance

that has been made since.

It seems incomprehensible

that one man in his own

lifetime could live through

such progress.

After our very brief period

of instruction of about a week,

2 to 3 hours,

in order to learn to fly,

we were sent to College

Park, Maryland.

We immediately started in

to try to find some method

by which we could develop

from the standpoint of taking photographs

using the machine gun

dropping bombs.

The air arm of the United States

Navy began under equally

apathetic circumstances.

Naval Aviator number

three was Admiral John H.

Towers. - In the autumn of 1911,

when I was quite a young naval officer

serving aboard one of our battleships.

I got the idea

that I wanted to learn to fly,

that naval aviation

would amount to something

for naval purposes.

So I put in a request

to the Navy Department,

and they came back

and quite frankly, said

that they didn't believe aviation would ever

amount to anything.

But if it turned out to be otherwise,

they would consider my request.

During that winter,

Congress,

appropriated money

for the Navy to buy three airplanes.

So they were in it whether or not

they wanted to be.

And, then

they decided to select three officers to be taught

to fly as part of the contract

with the manufacturers of the airplanes.

I was fortunate enough

to be one of those three officers.

The other two were Ellison and Rogers.

I also became a very close

friend of Glenn Curtiss,

and, was associated with him

throughout his whole life.

The man had an enormous amount of vision.

He had already conducted,

in cooperation with the Navy, tests of,

landing an airplane

on a platform, on a cruiser,

and also of taking off.

What he had in his mind then, the idea

which later developed

into the powerful carriers that we have today.

The airplane now had official recognition

both from the Army and the Navy, but

it was a cautious acceptance.

The time forged armaments

still held sway

when the fledgling army fliers experimented

with a primitive bombsight and a Louis machine gun

installed an aircraft

at College Park, Maryland.

They landed and foresaw

whole battles that someday might be

fought in the air.

The War Department

promptly pierced that bubble.

An official spokesman

pointed out with finality

that the Army had airplanes

for just one purpose.

Reconnaissance.

From a pistol shot in Sarajevo.

The first of the great modern

world wars exploded.

And almost overnight, all of Europe

was engulfed in conflict.

Once the great armies had met head on,

the conflict resolved itself

into a desperate struggle to hold

this plot of ground,

This foot of earth.

Military analysts called it

positional warfare.

But the foot soldiers knew it

only as a war of trenches,

a desperate fight

for a waterlogged home.

Automotive power

began to supplement the feeding, supplying

and tending of troops burrowed in the earth.

The tank made its combat

appearance,

but for many months the First World War

remained an earthbound conflict.

The airplane was put to work just as the U.S.

War Department spokesman had prophesied.

As observation and

scouting cracked.

The source of peril

lay in the artillery, machine

gun and rifle fire,

scourging the entrenched

troops from across the wasted land.

But in the air,

Allied and German

pilots often waved to each other

as they passed on their observation missions.

Then, instead of the courteous way

the opposing pilots began

exchanging pistol fire,

presently, the first crudely mounted

machine guns appeared.

Now the frantic race

of inventing, improvising, adapting and refining

aircraft equipment began.

Quickly, the Germans countered

the hand-operated machine gun by installing

upon their aircraft the invention of Tony Fokker,

a machine gun synchronized

to fire through the aircraft propeller.

A paramount lesson that the allies

were to remember a generation later was being learned

in air warfare for the first time.

No design

capable of still further development could be frozen.

And countermeasures

must be met by counter-

countermeasures.

It was becoming clear that no nation

or race had a corner on invented skill.

While the single engined airplane had been engrossing,

most designers, in

Russia Igor Sikorsky,

- In 1912, I decided

that the time came to build

a large machine with several motors.

At that time,

I was certain already

that the future of aviation will be connected

with fairly large aircraft,

that the closed cabin

with its comfort, protection

from wind and so forth, represent a must.

In ‘13 I completed my first,

four motored aeroplane

the Grand,

the ship proved a complete success.

It flew quite well.

The Grand’s military successor,

the Ilya Muromets

was the first four engine bomber

in world history.

It struck time after time

at the Central Powers on the Eastern Front.

The internal combustion

engine now became an instrument

of intensive technical development.

The first successful engine

had not been developed until 1860.

One of the world's foremost engine designers,

Leonard S. Hobbs, recollects its history.

It starts out actually

with a little known Frenchman

by the name of Lenoir,

who has never gotten

the credit he deserved.

He built and actually marketed the first

internal combustion engine,

and it was from his engine

that the Wright brothers were able

to build one.

Of course, the early pre-war

power plants are fairly well known.

The Anzanis and the Curtiss

OXs.

The First World War did mark

a great advance in power plants.

First there were the rotaries, the clergets,

the gnome Rhones.

Then there was the Renault engine,

which was a very good French engine.

The British R.A.F.

engines.

Toward the end of the war came the very beginning

of what I think is the

is the modern engine.

First there was the Hispano

squeezer with its solid block

and valve arrangement,

which is, is, standard

in a lot of engines to this day.

Also out of the First World War came

a remarkable German effort.

The BMW.

Now, this engine is the first engine

that I know of in all history

that attempted to overcome

the effects of altitude

on power.

Into a conflict

in which European antagonists had been tempered

by three years of savage battle,

whose equipment had been perfected

by the necessity of survival without regard to cost.

The United States now plunged.

It was the world's 14th ranking air power,

with only 28 airplanes,

65 pilots,

supplemented by 50

flying students.

Its Navy combat air

arm was even smaller.

Its industry lacked integration.

The nation that had allotted Benny

$150 in 1910 for maintenance

of that year's Air Force,

promptly voted $600

million to fulfill a plea by the allies

to have 5000 airplanes

and 4500 pilots on the Western

Front by the spring of 1918.

When we entered the war, the country knew that

the United States already had

an industrial capacity,

double that of Great Britain,

France and Germany combined.

We quickly realized that to supplement the meager

aeronautical developments resulting from years

of federal indifference to air power,

we had to obtain licenses for the production

of proved British and French airplanes

and aircraft engines in our new factories.

Our national mistake was the assumption

that an instrument as dynamic as the airplane

could be designed,

tested and developed overnight.

Thousands of rookie

pilots training in the United States

and in England and France

had an inspiring example of American air combat

performance through the brilliant

exploits of the Lafayette Escadrille,

a team of American volunteers

who had joined the Allied cause in 1916.

But American performance

had its hours of frustration.

One of the first young

pilots to see action in France with the first

Aero Squadron was Oliver P. Echols.

We'd been equipped with a

new type of French airplane,

with a new

and very much improved engines.

These airplanes

were assigned to us.

The squadron had the strength

of 18 airplane,

and we were assigned

the mission of supporting

one of the American divisions

one afternoon in the attack.

Our planes took off 18 strong.

During the afternoon

all of their airplanes

force landed from engine failure.

Fortunately, none of them behind the enemy line,

but out of the 18

airplanes that went out,

none of them got back.

The pilots of World War One made the term

dogfight synonymous with their work.

America's top ace, Captain Eddie

Rickenbacker of the famed 94th,

had in Ring Squadron,

reflects on the different approaches

to combat of the pilots of World War One

and the pilots of today.

That individualism was possible

because the planes were much slower and could

stay in maneuver.

Whereas today

it's impossible because of the tremendous

speed, the difference of 100 mile an hour and six,

seven and 6 or 700 miles an hour.

We had 150 horsepower.

Today, if they haven't got 5 or 6000

horsepower, it's no good.

We had two little pop guns, 30 caliber,

that would shoot sometimes

450 rounds a minute.

Today, they've got six

and 850 caliber guns that’ll shoot

a thousand rounds a minute

with a couple of cannon

thrown in 20 millimeter

or 37 millimeter cannon,

and then maybe a half a dozen

or a dozen rockets that,

have terrific destructive power.

All of which means that

today, the time element

is so limited for a pilot

in combat with an enemy

that it's a matter of a fraction of a second.

Today, he has a cockpit

full of instruments and gadgets.

Pressurize these air conditioners.

We have a gasoline gauge,

an oil gauge.

We had a tachometer,

a revolution counter.

Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.

And the fourth instrument was an altimeter that we could

never rely on.

The Navy's pre-war requests

for funds to build up its air

arm had been denied,

and only a skeleton

naval air force existed.

A naval officer whose career has bridged

two wars in aeronautics,

Admiral DeWitt C Ramsey.

From the outset,

the Navy's

problem has been to bring aircraft

into the mobile

operating forces of the fleet.

We may say that

this had its start

in World War One

and post the post-World

War One period,

when kite balloons

were used from

battleships and auxiliaries

for gunfire spotting

and tactical reconnaissance.

The equipment was very cumbersome,

and as hydrogen was used

as the lifting gas

for the balloons,

we found that

it was not a satisfactory

measure of doing a naval job.

So they were abandoned

after a short, relatively short trial.

The real beginning of naval aviation,

let us say, took place in England,

where during World

War One, the latter part of it,

the British converted two ships,

the Furious and the Argus,

and built into them

the features which were desirable

for aircraft launching

and recovery.

I happen to have been in England

about that period

and kept our Navy Department

informed of the progress of the British in this field.

As a result,

the Navy

embarked on an initial program of converting

the old collier Jupiter

into our first flattop.

The Langley.

In 1918, as the war

began to move toward its climax,

American aircraft

equipment still had not entered combat.

An intensive effort was being made

to perfect the Liberty engine.

Before the Liberty or any other aerial product of

the United States, designing boards

could be put in action,

the final critical

offensive of World War One had begun.

Millions of men pulled out of trenches

to attack or retreat. Above them

to be sure, planes flew in bombing

and strafing missions.

Individual pilots

whose names became legendary met

in dogfights.

Germany's von Richthofen,

France's Fonck, Canada's Bishop,

Germany's Göring,

and such American aces as Rickenbacker,

Luke, Lufbery,

Vaughn, Springs,

Kindley, Landis, Thaw, Hunter.

In retrospect,

it might be said that aviation itself

served a very small part,

in the result of the World

War One conflict.

However, it did prove itself,

that is, that

it was easy to recognize

that with proper equipment,

at another later time,

aviation might become

a real instrument

of military warfare.

After the war was over, a great

many of American boys had been taught to fly,

but they didn't get to the front.

Of course, after the war was over,

they had nothing to do.

And there were a great many surplus airplanes.

And that is the period when you hear so much

about of the days of barnstorming

after the war with all these surplus airplanes.

A lot of the fellows who had been taught to fly

then decided to go out and carry passengers

and do stunts at a regular exhibition, flying

principally at county fairs

and state fairs and things of that sort.

Both the Army

and Navy Air Arm shortly were reduced once again

to organizations hardly larger

than the membership of a civic club.

Yet in both services, the men who remained

were uniquely zealous advocates of their calling.

Almost to a man,

they realized they had only begun to explore

the capacities that the airplane offered

in size, speed, range, and altitude.

Performance.

A decade was dawning in American history

that was to be known flippantly

as the ERA of Wonderful

Nonsense.

Beneath its surface corruption,

its wild enthusiasms,

and its extravagant posturing.

History now has found that it was a time in which men

in many fields of the arts and sciences,

were employing immense physical energy

to attain goals of a sober worth.

Aviation had its share of such men.

The accomplishments of the

20s were presaged in 1919

by man's first flight across

the Atlantic Ocean.

The NC4, a large flying boat,

whose development had begun during

the war, was chosen,

as the Navy's pioneer pilot

Admiral Towers points out,

for the ambitious task.

When the war was over,

the first one was just about completed.

So I proposed to the Navy Department

that we’d go ahead the following

spring. And,

with as many of these aircraft as could be built

by that time, that

the Navy undertake

to be the first to fly the Atlantic.

Luckily for me, I was selected

to command that expedition.

It's all history now.

Two of the three airplanes,

landing at sea in very rough

water was so damaged they couldn't make it.

But the NC four

made it from Newfoundland

to the Azores, to Lisbon.

Army pilots already had inaugurated

the airmail service on May 15th,

1918, a service

that had been under discussion since 1910.

William Boeing, who had entered aviation

in 1916,

was instrumental in starting the first international

airmail service on the North American continent.

In 1919,

Eddie Hubbard

and I took

a flight up to Vancouver, B.C.

On our return trip,

the postmaster at Vancouver

handed us a mail sack

for delivery

for the postmaster at Seattle.

This was the first international mail

ever carried by plane

into the United States.

What real utilities the airplane actually offered

were overshadowed in the public eye

by its use as a spectacular, stunting device throughout

the pastures and primitive flying

fields of the country.

The Jenny could be bought for as little

as $50,

and men who had flying in their blood

preferred to scramble for the few dollars they could

make, risking their lives in exhibition flying

rather than seeking out

pedestrian jobs.

As one of them, Dick

Depew, cheerfully said,

the greatest hazard in flying

is the risk of starving to death.

Abruptly, the country's attention

concentrated on a single man

with a single theme.

Brigadier General William Mitchell,

who had had a distinguished war record, argued

that the Mahan Doctrine of sea power

had been outmoded by the airplane

and pleaded for a separate

national air arm.

He contended in seeking a $60

million appropriation for Army Air services,

or about half the cost

of a single battleship

that the United States could begin

developing an air force

which could hold mastery of

both the air and the seas.

Larry Bell was still with Glenn Martin when:

- That resulted in Congress

bringing about a test

wherein one of the targets

that we were supposed to sink

or try to sink

was the famous Ostfriesland

the pride of the German Navy,

which we had captured.

This ship was anchored about

100 miles

offshore, and six of the Martin

bombers went out, each carrying a 2,000 pound bomb.

They paraded over the battleship

and they dropped the six bombs and only one hit it.

And that was by mistake.

The rest were timed to detonate at 100ft

below the surface,

and it practically exploded.

The Ostfriesland

At least it ripped the bottom

of the ship from bow to stern,

and the ship sank in four minutes.

The Navy had already begun systematically

to broaden the scope of its Bureau of Aeronautics.

Many of its men, whose views of the need for

air power were not as vehement as Billy Mitchell's,

nevertheless already had envisioned carriers

as the heart of future striking forces.

Admiral Ramsey was the navigator

of the Navy's first flat top, the Langley.

The Langley had at best

14 knots maximum speed,

and that's all the wind speed

she could generate and manufacture.

So we had to wait for adequate

wind conditions to perform flight operations.

The nation's first large aircraft carriers,

the Saratoga and the Lexington,

were designed and were being built.

These great ships,

developing approximately

180,000 horsepower,

manufactured all of the wind

that was needed

in the absence of a surface

wind for flight operations.

The nation accepted the airplane

and tacitly agreed with its advocates,

but there was still no federal

provision for long range planning and procurement.

Nevertheless, a corps of designers

and manufacturers stayed with the business.

In the ceaseless drive to attain longer

range and more reliable performance,

the airplane,

its engine, its components and its instruments

steadily were growing more complex.

But the primary goal was speed.

Roscoe Turner: - I have maintained ever since

that I've been flying that there's only one reason

for flying, and that is speed.

It's 1910 Curtiss,

49 miles an hour.

1910 White, 61 miles an hour.

1911 Wyman, 78 miles an hour.

19 and 20 Mosley,

156 miles an hour

Morn in 19 and 22,

206 miles an hour. In 19 and 25,

Doolittle, 232 miles an hour.

Jimmy Doolittle, a hell for leather pilot

whose own cold judgment was that

he was essentially a technician.

These record flights

have a very real meaning.

Competition has perhaps always been

the greatest stimulus

to improvement,

and out of this competition

came improvement.

Improvements that were

improvements on the performance of aircraft

and the safety of aircraft.

And those improvements were immediately

applicable to the military

and indirectly applicable

to commercial aviation.

The ferment of the early 20s brought forth men

who combined technical gifts with a skill of organization.

A few such men, like Chance

Vought had formed their own companies

and built successful airplanes.

Others had served their apprenticeship

with aviation's early pioneers,

but now they were branching out on their own.

Dutch Kindelberger

recollects a small episode

that launched an enduring company.

Even in the 35 years that I've been messing with it

myself.

There have been vast changes,

particularly technically.

I can remember

very distinctly when,

at the Martin Company in 1920,

Don Douglas,

who was then the chief engineer, left

to come out to California to start his own business.

I helped him pack.

We packed up from his office about,

oh, two ordinary condensed

milk cartons full of data.

In those two cartons,

we put everything that was known

and printed, some of it wrong

about the science

of aviation engineering.

Today,

you couldn't pack into this room

the index of such technical information,

let alone the subject matter.

Machine, began to get complicated.

And from there on came

the specialists.

A great many great men

have contributed to aviation

purely as specialists.

Sperry, one of the greatest.

Colonel Clark, who devised

one of the first good airfoils.

Sam Heron came along

with his cylinders and his fuel, and then Frank Mock

with his carburation devices and later fuel injection.

Frank Caldwell, with his propeller.

Our earliest propellers were all wooden propellers,

but they

had several shortcomings.

They were subject

to atmospheric troubles,

and they twisted out of shape

at various climates,

and they were also quite thick,

so that the high speed at which propeller

tips operated, they were losing efficiency.

One of the things which we did to overcome

this was to develop a metal propeller,

which first was a drop

forged aluminum alloy blade,

being very much thinner than the wooden ones.

The efficiency was maintained

in better condition.

And also they were quite stable

in various atmospheric conditions.

Sam Heron began working on aircraft engines

as early as 1909,

and shortly went to the Royal

Aircraft Factory in England.

I came to this country in 1921,

and for the next five years

was engaged

in air cooled cylinder development.

It was really the air cooled engine

that made fuel development so necessary.

The first move was to put

tetraethyl lead in the existing gasoline.

Later, the Air Force

got the idea

of adding the component

that has the high,

the high end of the octane

scale to the gasoline.

And that eventually led

to 100 octane gasoline.

Frank Mock, the carburation and fuel control specialist.

Our carburation work has always had to be

a good bit like that of the Wright brothers

in the respect that we could

get little guidance from the textbook.

The automobile carburetor, of course.

Was designed to operate on a level

the aircraft carburetors have to climb,

die of heat and fly upside down.

Also, they have to go up an altitude

where the air is thin.

Mock, Hobbs, Barry, Clarke,

Caldwell,

Heron. The singular devotion with which these men

and scores of other specialists pursued

their particular fields leads H.M.

Jack Horner, whose own specialty of aircraft

production combined the fruits of all their labors to say:

That heritage of

research,

development, background work

that goes into aircraft

has continued

throughout

the whole existence of aircraft,

and the great improvements that have come there to.

After that,

with flight becoming a little bit

more common,

I think it's important

to realize the fervor

with which those individuals

did carry on their work.

It was a passion with them.

Then, midway in the 20s

came two events that turned the course

of American aviation sharply upward.

First, the government

adopted the recommendations

of President Coolidge's moral board.

These called for a sustained

aircraft procurement program

built on the foundation of a privately operated

and technically competitive aircraft industry.

Although both military

airmen and technologists were convinced

that the airplane long before

had outgrown its function as a scout,

the bulk of our aircraft

still consisted of observation planes.

Now, new, more powerful

engines began to emerge for advanced aircraft,

which both services had developed.

The nation

moved rapidly from a third rate

air power to international leadership.

The second event was the successful

dream Charles Lindbergh,

made come true.

In his single

engine Ryan monoplane, Lindbergh

had flown the Atlantic nonstop to Paris.

Two weeks later,

carrying Charles Levine as a passenger,

Clarence Chamberlin flew

the Atlantic and landed in Germany.

Firstly of all, we were trying to beat Lindbergh away.

And second, we had to keep

our plans a deep dark secret

because we had overheard Mrs.

Levine say, if I thought my Charlie was going in that

airplane, I'd burn it up.

We finally got away about 6:00

in the morning on the 4th of June, 1927.

The first thousand

miles to Newfoundland

was so with good weather.

The only trouble was we had headwinds

and our tests on Long Island showed that

we could fly for 40 hours

with at 100 miles an hour.

Well, on the flight up to Newfoundland,

we were only making 70 miles an hour

and 70 miles an hour

for 40 hours is 2800 miles.

That was 3200 to land

on the other side, leaving the last 400 to swim.

Well, fortunately,

the wind shifted after we left Newfoundland.

And as you see, we made it.

Lindbergh's lonely adventure gripped

the imagination of the world

as one of man's most dramatic achievements.

The nation turned from its casual cynicism

to make the shy young pilot,

together with the airplane, a shining symbol

of the horizon, still beckoning

for conquest.

A vital factor

in the ascendancy of American aircraft had resulted

from the work of two companies

concentrating on the intensive

development of the radio air cooled engine.

In this country, Charlie Lawrence

was the first one to go into the air cooled side

and did some quite good work. His,

products

being eventually taken over by the Wright Company,

and it was really one of his engines

after a couple of major designs,

and they were really major designs.

But one of his engines

that powered the Lindbergh

flight.

Following

this came one of the best

of all of the powerplant engineers George J.

Mead. With his famous wasp and Hornets,

which would set up a new standard.

These engines had built in superchargers

and just about all the modern features.

In fact, they’re fairly representative

of today's engines.

Along with this

came another of the major

developments in the in the power plant

that is the turbo supercharger.

The turbo supercharger

was really quite a long time coming.

The French, a Frenchman by the name of Rato

and originally started to try and get it, but it took

the General Electric Company and Doctor Marsh

to get this thing, which made,

almost all the difference in the world.

The unusual

engineering accomplishments

of our

American aeronautical industry

began to bear fruit

in the late 20s and early 30s.

From a military point of view,

for the first time,

our various types

of combat planes

were unmatched abroad.

Moreover,

we found the solid beginning

of commercial air transport.

I remember

very well, in one evening

when Lindbergh and I were sitting

in a small restaurant in Cuba,

which we reached on the,

at the end of a Caribbean flight,

and using the menu for our paper,

we made sketches of a transatlantic clipper

that was back in ‘31, and a few years later,

the transatlantic clippers had been produced,

created, proved a success,

and as at present,

we know that transoceanic flying

is perfectly routine,

perfectly self

evident part of our modern life.

Jimmy Doolittle pioneered

trans continental nonstop flights.

In 1922

I flew from

Pablo Beach, Florida, near

Jacksonville to San Diego, California,

a distance of about 2200 miles in

22 hours and 20 minutes.

In 1931,

I flew from

Los Angeles,

California to New York

in 11 hours and 15 minutes.

That first flight was the first time that the continent

had ever been crossed in less than one day.

Second flight was the first time it had ever been

crossed in less than half a day.

Meantime,

the Army and the Navy air arms were making fast

strides in developing aviation.

They were flying

farther, higher, and faster.

The Air Corps was perfecting its concept of the bomber

as a long range strategic weapon.

In its exercises,

the Navy was demonstrating

the soundness of the carrier task force.

Individual officers were exploring

the use of new instruments and accessories, and testing

new theories to determine aircraft

reliability.

Two famous Army pilots,

Carl “Tooey” Spaatz and Ira Eaker, flew

seven days in 1929 without landing.

The question mark flight was an endeavor,

to use refueling as a means

of keeping the plane in the air for a long time.

The driving,

inspiration behind it. I,

believe, was Ira Eaker

on the, course between,

San Diego and, Burbank.

We passed over the home of Mrs.

Spaatz father and mother

And every time we passed over,

he would take my oldest

daughter, who was then,

about 6 or 7 out to see us go overhead.

And on the fifth or sixth

day, she, pointed this out to, Tattie

and said, “Tattie, there's your daddy up there.

He's been up in the air for 5 or 6 days-

for 5 days.”

Don't you think it's wonderful?

And, Tattie looked up and said,

no, I think it's dumb.

But the flight did prove

that refueling was practical.

General Eaker remembers an incident that forecast

the need for equipment which would permit blind

flying. In 1919,

flying in the Philippines from Manila to Stotsenburg,

our station at that time,

I ran into a typhoon, and the rain was so heavy

that I couldn't see the horizon.

I fell in a spin, and only the fact that

the Manila Bay was yellow

and the rain was darker

was I able to recover

from the spin and fly home.

To my

surprise, I found for the first time

that when you can't couldn't see, you couldn't fly.

I described this to Lieutenant Longfellow.

Later, General Longfellow

in the Second World War.

And we began some crude experiments

by hanging a plumbob down

across the instrument board and by putting a carpenter's

level on the line to run,

and got so that with these two aides,

we could fly through, cloud through

several thousand feet of cloud.

And that was one of the early days of

instrument flying.

Ten years after general Eaker’s Manila experience,

Jimmy Doolittle in association

with the Sperry company tackled the problem.

I made the first blind flight,

the first completely blind flight,

taking off under a hood,

plying a prescribed course

and landing back under the hood

without ever having seen out of the airplane.

This doesn't sound

very important now,

but out of that came

two instruments

the artificial horizon,

the directional gyro

that are today standard equipment

on every commercial airplane

and every combat military airplane.

The chain of development led back to General Eaker.

During the First Transcontinental

blind flight,

Bill Kepner

and I had a very practical

but unexpected demonstration

of the value of instrument flying.

My ship was a P-12 with a hood over it

and a similar ship, a P12 bill, followed behind

as the safety pilot,

so that he could tell me to turn right or left

to avoid the obstacles or other planes in flight.

At one point, he was giving me,

rather repeated instructions, and I could tell by the water

seeping into the under

the cover that we were in a heavy rainstorm.

So finally he said, hold your present course steadily.

I'm going to fly formation on you.

And 4 or 5 minutes he called on the radio again,

and he said, we've come through the storm

now, and I can see again.

During that period of time,

you, led us through because I couldn't see either.

The Great Depression had come,

the industry was hard hit, but nevertheless,

new companies developed to meet the increasing

complexity of the airplane

and its growing use of metals,

electronics and automatic controls.

Dutch Kendelberger

departed from Douglas to take over

North America. Companies were formed bearing the famous

names Bell, Fairchild, Northrop,

Beech, Cessna.

A World War Navy pilot, Leroy Grumman,

left Civil engineering to enter aviation.

We know that a conventional airplane

wouldn't,

get us in order.

We finally ended up

with the design of the first military fighter

with retractable landing gear,

for which we got a contract

and which proved to be highly successful,

having a speedy from excess

of any current Army or Navy fighter

of that time.

A pioneer aviation

journalist, Earl Findley, once went to see

the Wright Brothers’ contemporary, Thomas Edison.

I asked if I could have a short interview with Mr.

Edison and you had to get awful

close to him.

He put his hand up like this.

“Yeah?”

Mr. Edison?

What do

you think of the airplane?

Oh, airplane?

And this is after he had been talking

to Farman all morning

when the biplane

“never amount to a damn,”

till they get,

“they got to do it different.”

They have to have something

like a hummingbird

go up

and go

this way and come back this way, that way,

this way, and come down,” he said.

And, well, I,

“I tried it once,

ain't easy.”

And I got to doing something

else, but,

somebody is going to do it.

But that's remained

the opposite side of speed,

namely the aircraft that could fly

with no speed at all, that could take off from any spot

and would not be in need of an airport at all.

The 30s also were the years in which each summer,

fierce competition was held

to determine the best of the airplane breed.

Proof of the

individual airplanes, engines and pilots

came in the National Air Races,

with thousands looking on

the legendary pilots raced: Doolittle,

Heslop, Turner,

Whitman, Levere,

Bock, Newman, Fuller,

Jacqueline,

and fliers

still flew against the clock

across the continent,

across the seas,

and indeed around the world itself.

Falcon, Post

Gatty, Bird, Hughes, Amelia

Earhart and Wrong-Way Cork

as the hours swung late in the 30s,

the air races were curiously American,

for in Europe and Asia, aviation

was not a case of relatively puny efforts and sum

such as America, was providing

much of it from individual

man and companies.

Rather,

the vast resources

of powerful foreign nations

now were thrown behind the construction of air

forces designed to subdue the world

or to defend against

such aggression.

In the United States

under the impact of the depression,

Congress had scrapped the Moral Board procurement

plan and stopped providing appropriations

for 1800 military airplanes that had been scheduled.

On New Year's Day

in 1936, the Army Air Corps

had only 300 planes fit for war duty.

A year later,

we had dropped to sixth place

among powers and air combat strength.

Although our industry was judged to be technically

at least 18 months ahead of

foreign competition.

Eduard Daladier lamented,

if I had had 4000 airplanes,

there would have been no Munich.

France had squandered a first rate

air power while she sat behind the

Maginot Line.

The British, too, had

let the axis powers outstrip them

frantically, both countries

turned toward the United States, aware that

in the very act of running hard to meet crisis

after crisis, an emphasis

had been placed upon research,

experiment and development

which gave the United States

technically superior aviation equipment.

So the free world

turned to the United States

not only for airplanes,

but all of those weapons

embodying the modern arsenal.

To expand its facilities,

to train workers

and to adapt its job shop operations

to techniques of mass production, took time.

The tooling was still under

way when Germany struck.

Poland was shattered.

Holland

and Belgium were overrun.

France succumbed.

The gratitude of every home

in our island

in our Empire,

and indeed throughout the world,

except in the abodes

of the guilty,

goes out to the British airmen

who, undaunted by odds,

unwearied in their constant

challenge of mortal danger,

are turning the tide of war

by their prowess

and by their devotion.

Never in the field of

human conflict was so much owed

by so many

to so few.

Now the stubborn

British stood alone

over Poland, Holland,

Belgium and France,

Germany's Luftwaffe had demonstrated that

the airplane was a vital weapon of modern

offensive war.

In the skies above England,

the Royal Air Force now

demonstrated that the airplane

was a vital instrument of modern defensive war.

The struggle in

Europe shook America

a month after Congress had received a bill providing

only 61 combat airplanes for the Army Air Corps

for the following year,

President Roosevelt called for a long range

production program of 50,000

airplanes.

America slowly mobilized

its productive capacity.

It began to draft its young men.

It sought to train them

with wooden guns, cardboard

tanks, and mock airplanes until it could gear

its productive capacity to build the real thing.

The war spread.

Germany seized Norway

turned on its momentary

ally, Russia. Overran Greece.

Joined

its partner Italy in Africa and encouraged

its Asiatic ally, Japan.

Nothing could have convinced the people of America

more surely, of the bitter nature of modern war

than the sneak punch that Japan

threw at Pearl Harbor.

The nation fell to work to expand its token

battle forces and its production

into a great tide of men and machines.

To train men and to equip them

required long months,

particularly in aviation.

Immediately after the president's

pronouncement in 1940,

the licenses were given

to the automotive group,

largely to assist

in the production schedules which lie

ahead, and nevertheless,

until the end of 1943,

the equipment

which actually saw service

on the various fighting fronts

all over the world

were furnished entirely

by the aeronautical industry

because it was the fact

that it required

20 months

to two years for the average

automotive company to begin.

With their momentum at full flood,

the Japanese swept

through the Pacific.

Jimmy Doolittle and a little band of fliers

carried the war home to them and a joint

Navy Air Force operation.

I have frequently been asked

what was the purpose

and what was the effect of the first Tokyo raid?

Well, the purpose

was to take the war to Japan,

to show them that their

island was not inviolate.

The effect,

well the effect was

to cause them to divert

some of their military strength

that was needed in the South Pacific

to the protection of the home

islands.

The actual damaging effect

was very little.

Our airplanes were on the Hornet.

We were intercepted

just after daylight

on the morning of April 18th,

1942, by Japanese surface craft.

We took off immediately,

proceeded to target

and all but one of the planes

carried on to the coast of China.

We carried one ton of bombs

and each one of 16 airplanes.

We dropped 16 tons of bombs on 4

or 5 different targets.

When you realize that from the Marianas

and the later stages of the war,

B-29s were carrying

as much as 6000 tons of bombs

in one operation

and dropping them on a single target.

You realize how puny our effort was.

Slowly, the nation began

to regain control of the air and the sea lanes.

that it had lost in the Pacific.

The first great victory

was the battle of the Coral Sea.

Captain,

one of the Navy's ablest fliers and tacticians,

remembers that battle

and the subsequent Battle of Midway.

If you're going to apply the principle

of concentration of force, for example,

you've got to work with other people and have a

good system of teamwork.

I think that's

one of the reasons why

an attack by a carrier based air group

is so effective.

It's,

almost a simultaneous thing,

like a one, two punch in boxing

in the battle of the Coral

Sea, for example,

the dive

bombers and torpedo planes

and the fighters

came in almost simultaneously,

but the enemy concentrated

on the dive bombers

at the same time that let the torpedo

planes in.

And they did most of the damage.

On the other hand,

in the Battle of Midway later,

the enemy fighters concentrated on the torpedo

planes

and the dive

bombers came in almost unmolested.

I could see them coming down like a huge waterfall,

and there were practically no misses.

They were the ones that did

the job in the Battle of Midway.

With its growing stream

of trained soldiers, sailors and airmen equipped

with improved weapons, the United States

and her allies took the offensive.

Rommel was driven from Africa.

Sicily and Italy were invaded.

From their bases in England,

American bombers began

to strike at the heart of Germany

under the direction of General Spotts.

Strategic bombing was one of the ways

of winning the war,

and our fighter operations,

in a large measure,

developed into a covering operations

for the bombers.

In order to do that,

we had to have the development

that had taken place.

Good radio.

So the leader of the fighter

outfit could not only talk to his own men,

but be in communication

with the bombers and,

in turn get some guidance from,

ground control stations,

on the ground by radio.

This resulted

in a different type of fighting

and a different type of operation,

but it proved conclusively

in World War Two

that the airplane

had developed to such an extent

that air warfare

became a different war

altogether than land

and sea warfare.

Wellwood Beall,

a member of a team of designers

who created the B-17,

saw the airplane

altered from a defensive

to an offensive weapon.

The conception of

strategic air bombing,

was not,

fully developed at that point.

Originally, for instance, the,

B-17, was built,

to protect our coast

from an invading fleet,

and hence it was called a flying

fortress.

But, when we got to England,

it was obvious that,

to use these bombers,

to the greatest advantage

that we would have to,

not only get the enemy's,

supply lines,

but, the places

where he manufactured,

his, military equipment.

The British,

thought it would be easier to do it at night.

It had a much greater

chance of success

and would be less vulnerable

to enemy fighters.

And they called air bombing

saturation bombing.

They dropped large numbers of bombs

on, a large industrial area.

The Americans, however,

decided that with the B-17

and the B-24

that they could pinpoint,

specific targets.

For instance, the ball bearing factory in Swinford,

they, in order,

to do the job properly,

decided that it should be done a daytime

where their bombsight

was the most effective.

Step by step, the allies began sweeping

back across the reaches of the Pacific.

The terrible

cost

we took Rawa, Saipan,

Kwajalein, Guam, Bougainville

and the Philippines, setting the stage

for the aerial assault on Japan itself.

At home,

the United States had channeled

its great energies, and its vast technologies

to produce and flood the goods of war.

And now, with our allies,

our integrated sea, land

and Air Combat Team attacked.

You know.

No one in aviation

believes that aviation alone

won the war.

We do believe that the

war might not have been won

by ourselves and our allies.

Except that we had control

of the air.

The massive, intricate,

highly trained combat team that America had put together

at a stupendous cost dissolved

almost overnight.

A free people yielded

to a free impulse.

They demobilized their men and discarded

much of their equipment.

In the field of aviation alone,

they had built an incredible

96,318 airplanes

in the war year of 1944.

Two years later, the production had shrunk

to 1,669

planes. Where the civilian aviation

interest had turned to stunting and barnstorming

at the end of World War One.

Now the airplane had assumed the civilian role

of a fast passenger and freight carrier.

The network of airlines,

which had sprung up in the 20s and 30s,

was extended to every corner of the free World.

Four engine transports of ocean spanning range

sped millions of passengers

across the continent and across the seas.

The wartime DC four and constellation

were followed by faster, farther

ranging successors:

DC-6s,

advanced constellations,

Strato cruisers,

and such twin engine ships

as the 202 and 340.

In a time of spiraling costs

only air travel grew cheaper.

From fewer than 6000 passengers

the airlines had hauled in 1926,

they quickly rose to where

in 1952 they carried 24 million

passengers, 12

billion passenger miles.

The Wright brothers’

vision was still the goal of virtually

all men in aviation, such as Robert Gross,

whose industrial team produced

the constellation series.

Of course, it's obvious to,

I guess, everyone that

the airplane has been

preponderantly military

since its start many years ago.

But there are signs, particularly

in the last few years, that perhaps it wasn't

always going to be ponderantly a military weapon,

man, and science

must go forward hand in hand.

It can do a lot of things

this airplane, it can bring hundreds

of millions of people throughout the world

in intimate contact with one another,

and contact with one

another means understanding

and understanding

in the end, means peace.

[Announcing flights]

In the war's closing hours,

Germany had employed

guided missiles brutally,

but without decisive effect.

Simultaneously,

England and Germany

had put a few airplanes in the air, powered

by a radical new type of engine,

the jet turbine.

The jet became really important in aviation.

The accumulated engineering knowhow

that this country had built up with its pistonation

equipment suddenly became

very much less important.

This event was really a great

leveler

in engineering

background and potential for all countries,

and we had to start over again

to try to regain the supremacy

which we had in World War Two.

In their march across Germany,

Russia had seized Germany's

military tools and designs,

and many of the engineers who were developing the jet.

The Russians now

increasingly saw the Allied victory in which

they had been a partner as largely

their own.

The Western world was either bled

white by the war or demobilized.

Russia and its communist allies alone

kept their armies intact

their whole creed was one of force,

and they began imposing

that force on Poland,

Bulgaria, Romania

and Czechoslovakia.

Russia's abrupt

belligerence forced this country's attention

upon the air power we had let melt away.

For the third time in

little more than a generation,

the nation set about building

a modern air arm,

this one to be shaped

around the fantastic speeds

the gas turbine engine provided.

Then, in 1948,

when the Russians sealed off the land corridors

leading to western Berlin,

the United States, England and France

countered with a famous Berlin airlift

from their bases

outside the Iron Curtain,

a steady stream of airplanes

flew night and day, supplying West Berlin's 2

million residents with food, fuel and medicine.

Finally, the communists capitulated

and reopened the land corridor.

Then they sent their minions

into war in Korea.

There, the United Nations chose

to stand and fight.

It was a strange, bitter,

circumscribed war.

The Air Force's prime striking weapon,

its Strategic Air Command, was ruled out of bounds.

The first sustained jet

combat in history took place in a quadrangle

of sky up to 40,000ft above the Earth,

but always south of the Yalu

River.

Russia sent aloft a first rate

jet fighter, the MiG.

Only the Air Force's

saber from the United Nations

array of fighter planes could match it.

It was a war in which

transport airplanes flew

7000 miles to deliver material

and to return sick and wounded men,

and it was a war

in which the helicopter,

with its ability to fly, standing still and land

anywhere, did a multitude of jobs,

among them transporting literally

thousands of wounded from the battlefield

to area hospitals

for prompt surgical attention.

Under the impact of Korea,

the nation had begun again

to turn out modern aircraft in quantities.

Mundy

Peale, the chairman of the Industry’s association.

That we as an aircraft industry

are at present time

turning about 14,000 airplanes.

At the moment we are a healthy industry.

We have to pour back tremendous amount of funds

into research and development

funds that we earn

when we make the airplanes.

This is a very healthy thing.

It creates competition.

We want competition.

Dutch Kendelberger, whose organization

built the saber, pictures the sky ten miles

high as man flies at a speed approaching that of sound.

Today

we are flying at very great speeds and at very high altitudes.

As a matter

of fact, up in the area at which

a lot of the fighting is being done,

around 50,000ft.

We have a different world.

It's a thin

blue, dark blue air.

The sun

doesn't shine so readily because there's

nothing to reflect it.

There's no plane of reference

for the pilots, such as hills

or clouds or sky

and such an atmosphere as this

even a bomber is hard to see.

And the trouble that we are facing

the future is not the sound barrier.

We know how to fly through that

now. The thing that is bothering everybody

is the thermodynamic barrier.

The air flowing over an airplane at these

very high speeds by friction

will heat up the surface of the airplane.

As a matter of fact,

if we go to Mach number two, which is twice

the speed of sound at sea level,

the surface of the

airplane will get hot

very rapidly and

will stabilize at about 500 degrees.

Since ordinary aluminum alloy loses

half its strength by 350 degree,

and that even

titanium and steels

begin to give trouble

at 500 and 600 degrees,

it's obvious that we are in a great deal

of difficulty in the future.

There also are many things

like hydraulic fluid.

We don't know how to make hydraulic fluid

that won't boil away at this temperature.

We don't know how to make packings

that won’t seize at this temperature

of bearings or lubricants.

In fact, if they bubble

with which everybody is familiar

gets soft

and which loses its shape

and disappear at 300 degrees.

So we have ahead of us

a great deal of research and a long,

long time of trouble

before we are going to be going

anything like the speeds

at which our magazine

supplement writers,

seem to think

we are ready for tomorrow.

Modern test pilots who fly at sonic speeds

and incredible altitudes,

take an equally factual view

of their calling. Tex

Johnston sums up his philosophy

after putting the J-57

powered B-52 through its paces.

After

12 years of, testing.

Ten years in the

jet field

involving,

first jet airplane to fly in this country,

the B-59

first rocket airplane

to fly in the United States, the X-1.

Incidentally, the first airplane to fly

faster than the speed of sound.

The B-47,

the B-52,

I believe all the more.

and two old

things. First, that one test

flight is worth a thousand expert opinions,

and the other one for the flyboys,

an altitude above you

and runway behind you will never do you any

good.

Chuck Yeager, the first man

to fly through the sonic barrier.

And Bill Bridgman, a test pilot

who has flown almost twice the speed of sound

and has piloted a plane

at an altitude of 79,000ft, discussed

their calling and language peculiarly their own.

Certainly enjoyed the work.

I think lodging’s

the only safe way to get into that kind of flying.

It's a heck of a lot safer

take offs that’s for sure.

Yeah, and you burn so much fuel

when you take off

before you get up

to the altitude where the airplane can drop you.

And I actually, I personally think

that's the most fun involved in flight

is when the guy cut you loose, you're just hanging there

for a minute just like on a roller coaster.

Yeah, you're pretty close to the stall, too

when you came out of there weren’t you?

Yeah, we stalled at around 240

indicated, with the full fuel load.

So a one time I remember Jack Ridley

if we had a release failure,

and he dropped me out at about 180

indicated, and I didn't know which end was up for a while.

Well,

I know I was on the skyrocket when we first dropped out

you could kind of feel a stall

by watching the boom out there, the boom began

to shake was he was on the mean.

You see it bend. - You see it oscillate a little bit.

And so the airplane has evolved

from the Wrights, whose first flights

at Kittyhawk were at speeds hardly faster than an athlete

can run, to speeds today, where the Bridgemans

was the Yeagers and the Johnstons

traveled faster than a bullet.

Horizons far beyond

today's achievements

still beckon.