A world without wings

The world is full of "What ifs." What if our carriers had reached Pearl Harbor a couple of clays earlier, and the Japanese had nailed them? What if Custer had said, "That's too many Sioux; let's get out while we still can."? What if Isaac Newton had sat a few feet farther from the tree, and the apple had missed him? And what if the Wright brothers had given up on that blustery December day, folded up their tents and sent a wire to home: "Forget it. Gravity can't be beaten."?

Yes, we know. If the Wrights hadn't succeeded, someone else surely would have, but let's just suppose that someone else didn't. Let's think about a 20th century without airplanes.

The technological and cultural impact of the airplane is unquestioned and probably not yet fully understood. The airplane is such an integral part of our lives that it is hard to imagine how history would have developed without it. For one thing, our world would move more slowly. And it would be bigger. Geography would mean something entirely different, thereby giving us a different attitude about distances.

The airplane, however, did much more than simply get us off the ground. It is like the proverbial rock tossed into a still pond: because the airplane birthed, or accelerated, so many new technologies, the ripples of its entry into all parts of society are still lapping against the shore. War was only the first entity to apply the technology of the airplane.

War and the airplane were made for each other. Each fed off the other-producing an intellectual adrenaline that spurred technological advances in a frenzy of development. As each period of bloodletting ended, however, the civilian populace eventually benefited from that progress. Were it not for WW 1, for instance, it would have been decades before the airplane matured into a useful tool. WW 11 gave us truly practical air transportation that then, in less than a decade, produced the jet airliner. And the world shrank yet again. But what if the wars of the 20th century hadn't had the airplane?

Among other things, without the airplane, the attack on Pearl Harbor would never have happened, and tin could nave continued to hide behind the moat that is the English Channel. Obviously, technology would not have stood still, whether there were or weren't airplanes, but few of the technological fallouts would have been as useful. Artillery, for instance, would have probably mutated into rockets and then into guided missiles, but these would have had few postwar civilian applications. It is unlikely that FedEx would deliver priority packages to your front door bv rocket!

Without the airplane, the atomic age might never have dawned. Without the practical delivery system represented by the strategic bomber, The Bomb would have had to wait until the early V-2 clones developed into full-fledged ICBMs to lift such a massive, lethal load. Or perhaps the concept of such a weapon may never have occurred to us at all. Without the airplane, aerial bombs would not have been invented in the first place, so the "bigger is better" thought pattern inevitably attached to weapon development would not have led in nuclear directions.

Would we have weather radar if it hadn't been for airplanes? And what about the "space race"? If we had not continued to stare at the heavens and put both humans and assorted high-tech junk into space, would computers have developed as quickly as they did?

What if; what if; what if .... There are endless scenarios. One thing is a fact, however: the airplane, along with electricity, the telephone and the internal-combustion engine, all of which were results of thought patterns started in the waning years of the 1800s, shaped the 20th century. Look around. What century-shaping technology are we developing today that will determine our tomorrow? More "What ifs," right?

Copyright Air Age Publishing Apr 2000
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