Destiny at Kitty Hawk

JUST about everyone has at least one relative who is more than 75 years old. Someone who was alive when the Wright Brothers made that historic first flight of a fully controlled heavier-than-air flying machine. The flight that led directly to enormous changes in transportation, warfare and, for many of us, sport and recreation. Three-quarters of a century seems like several lifetimes to a teenager. In terms of getting from one place to another, it is more like several lifetimes of progress. Yet is has all happened in just over the normal life span of the average person. Because of two men who were very far from average. It wasn't just that the Wright Brothers wanted to fly. A lot of men had been trying for years to invent the airplane. Most of them failed for reasons which today are painfully obvious. In most cases, they didn't bother to think the problems through. They sketched out something that looked like it ought to be able to fly, and went out and built it from whatever materials were handy.

Frank Fuller's Seversky SEV-S2

THE TWO most important American fighter planes of World War II were directly connected with the most prestigious long-distance race of their time. The Mustang and the Thunderbolt, or their close relatives, accounted for victories in the final seven Bendix Transcontinental Races, from 1937 through 1949. Mustangs totally dominated the four postwar Bendix Races, winning each with ease. In fact, no other type of airplane ever beat a Mustang in a Bendix Race. If four started the race, they captured the first four places. What is not nearly so well known is that the forerunners of the P-47 Thunderbolt dominated the final three prewar Bendix Races almost as completely. After the war it was a different story, as the sole attempt to race a P-47 ended on the starting line of the 1947 Bendix, but a decade earlier it was a long string of victories.

Time Flies

IT SEEMED to have absolutely everything an airplane needs to go fast. Except, maybe, a normal supply of luck. It was the cleanest radical-engined airplane of its day, and it was the most powerful. In Howell Miller, it had a designer

The Edgley Optica

"HEY, Martha, will ya lookit them little ants down there. . . .they's really people!" Usually the biggest surprise a person gets on his first flight is how different things look from up there, and how much more he can see than from down here. Barring smog and low clouds, the view is so much better aloft that it has inspired poets and even an occasional journalist to words of high praise. This special feature of flying was noticed about the time that the first men lifted off in a hot-air balloon from downtown Paris, back in 1783. The first practical use for balloons (not counting just drifting along with the happy breezes) was for observation of enemy forces in some long-ago European wars. In those days, general knew nothing about hiding their armies from aerial snoopers.

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