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(At Least) 100 Years Of Powered Human Flight
Rogue-Lion.com writes "Take a time out to remember the accomplishments of two bicycle shop owners who changed the world immeasurably, 100 years ago today. The Telegraph is running a story about a recreation of the Wright's (and world's) first heavier-than-air powered flight. President Bush will be in attendance at the event." Setting aside even more exotic theories, rod writes with an alternative point of view: namely, that man's first flight took place in New Zealand, on March 31, 1902. "I admire the U.S.A and the Wright brothers,but there are facts to consider today, 17/12/03, on the centenary of Kitty Hawk." Update: 12/17 13:44 GMT by T : Or was it a Brazillian invention? (Thanks,
Anderson Silva.)
Here it comes... another mention of American Wright Brothers sucess, another whine from the Brazilian community that THEY have the first flier. Who really cares...
get ?there? in the wink of an eye? get ready to see the vehicle? reboot is pending.
the daze of the execrabilious orwellian fuddite freemason corepirate nazi softwar gangster stock markup FraUDsters, is WANing into coolapps/the abyss, at the increasing speed of right.
consult with/trust in yOUR creators... you know where to look?
for each of the creators' innocents harmed, there is a badtoll that must/will be repaid by you/US, as the greed/fear/ego based perpetraitors of the life0cide against the planet/population, will not be available to make reparations.
They will probably be commemorating the wrong people in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, tomorrow. Five months before the Wright brothers lifted a flying machine into the air for 12 seconds above the sand dunes of the Outer Banks, the New Zealander Richard Pearse had traveled for more than a kilometer in his contraption, without the help of ramps or slides, and had even managed to turn his plane in mid-flight.
But history belongs to those who record it, so tomorrow is the official centenary of the airplane. At Kitty Hawk, George Bush will deliver a eulogy to aviation, while a number of men with more money than sense will seek to recreate the Wrights' first flight. Well, they can keep their anniversary. Tomorrow should be a day of international mourning. December 17 2003 is the centenary of the world's most effective killing machine.
The airplane. was not the first weapon of mass destruction. The European powers had already learned to rain terror upon their colonial subjects by means of naval bombardment, artillery and the Gatling and Maxim guns. But the destructive potential of aerial bombing was grasped even before the first plane left the ground. In 1886, Jules Verne imagined aircraft acting as a global police force, bombing barbaric races into peace and civilization. In 1898, the novelist Samuel Odell saw the English-speaking peoples subjugating eastern Europe and Asia by means of aerial bombardment. In the same year, the writer Stanley Waterloo celebrated the future annihilation of inferior races from the air.
None of this was lost on the Wright brothers. When Wilbur Wright was asked, in 1905, what the purpose of his machine might be, he answered simply: "War." As soon as they were confident that the technology worked, the brothers approached the war offices of several nations, hoping to sell their patent to the highest bidder. The US government bought it for $30,000, and started test bombing in 1910. The airplane. was conceived, designed, tested, developed and sold, in other words, not as a vehicle for tourism, but as an instrument of destruction.
In November 1911, eight years after the first flight, the Italian army carried out the first bombing raid, on a settlement outside Tripoli. Then as now, aerial bombardment was seen as a means of civilizing uncooperative peoples. As Sven Lindqvist records in A History of Bombing, the imperial powers experimented freely with civilization. from the skies. Just as the Holocaust was prefigured by colonial genocide, so the bombing raids which reduced Guernica, Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo and parts of London to ash had been rehearsed in north Africa and the Middle East.
As the enemy was reduced to a distant target in an inferior sphere, greater cruelties could be engineered than any effected before. The British knew what they were doing in Germany. Directive 22 to Bomber Command in 1942 ordered that the "aiming points" for fire-bombing be "built-up areas, not, for instance, the dockyards or aircraft factories". The Americans knew what they were doing in Japan. Major General Curtis LeMay, who incinerated 100,000 civilians in Tokyo, admitted: "We knew we were going to kill a lot of women and kids when we burned that town. Had to be done." Japan sought to negotiate peace, but the Allies refused to talk until they had taken their firebombing to its logical conclusion, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. LeMay later became chief of staff of the US air force. He was the man who, in 1964, promised to bomb Vietnam back into the stone age.
I doubt much mention will be made of all this at the centenary celebrations tomorrow. Instead we will be encouraged to concentrate upon the civil applications of this military technology. We will be told how the airplane. has made the world a smaller place, how it has brought people closer together, fostering understanding and friendship. There is something in this: the people of powerful nations might be reluctant to permit their leaders to destroy the countries they have visited. But commercial flights, like military flig
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