To: The Wright Brothers
Kitty Hawk, North Carolina
Dear Wilbur and Orville,
This year — 2003 — is the centenary of your great achievement: the first powered, sustained and controlled flight. The actual date of the celebrations will be 17 December, but Jetliner Cabins is taking this opportunity to offer early congratulations. (Some people might complain that the Wright Flyer of 1903 did not have a cabin, but we ignore such cavils.)
The prehistory of aviation is filled with examples of wild optimism, and many of the plans drawn up by would-be aviators, for others to test-fly, demonstrate that imagination was certainly not in short supply. For example, a most intriguing proposal was that if a sufficiently large flock of geese were harnessed together they could pull a chariot through the sky.
However, the journey to powered flight actually began in Switzerland in 1738 when Daniel Bernoulli, the greatest among an entire family of geniuses, promulgated the Bernoulli theorem that ’An increase in fluid velocity is associated with a decline in fluid pressure’, and in fact this is all we need to know in order to make an aircraft fly. In specific aviation terms, if the air flowing over the top of the wings is travelling faster than the air underneath them, the air pressure on top will be lower than the pressure below and the difference will pull everything up. This phenomenon is called ‘lift’, and it beats a flock of geese any day!
Bernoulli had solved the problem of lift, but that of ‘control’ remained intractable and optimists continued to dive assorted contraptions into the unforgiving earth or, sometimes, the sea. The German Otto Lilienthal was the first to fly gliders that could land in one piece with some consistency, and he made more than two thousand flights before his untimely death in 1896.
You learned from him, and added yet more experience — another one thousand glides — though experience in these new skills was not easily or cheaply bought. Your reward for many years of effort came on 17 December 1903, and although the five spectators present at this great moment in history were widely disbelieved when they claimed to have seen a man fly, the world was convinced by further demonstrations that the impossible had actually occurred.
Perhaps the most striking of all the circumstances of your achievement was that the prize was won not by giant companies with huge research budgets or by rich individuals in search of excitement, but by two brothers from a modest background, working with their own hands in their own bicycle shop. This, it was sometimes said, was the event that introduced the ‘Century of the Common Man’. So, in a sense, it was. But in many other ways you were very uncommon men. You opened the era of aviation.
Your successes inspired generations of intrepid aviators to pursue their aerial passions. Memorable names from the history books include Alcock, Blériot, Breguet, Brown, Curtiss, Earhart, Fokker, Johnson, Kingsford-Smith, Lindbergh, Markham, Saint-Exupéry, Santos-Dumont, Sikorsky and von Zeppelin. They, and other legendary aviation pioneers, made the marvel of flight a reality in even the most remote parts of the world, and it was their sense of mission that eventually led to the creation of the mass transportation systems that are now an everyday feature of modern life.
The aim of Jetliner Cabins is to survey just one small part of the vast legacy that we have inherited from you: the development of the commercial-aircraft cabin environment from the late 1970s to the turn of the millennium. Main topics include product branding, the passenger experience, cabin maintenance and the marketing challenge, and include comments from more than forty international specialists in the field.
Wilbur and Orville, it has been both a privilege and a pleasure to create this work. We salute you, and look forward to seeing you, in spirit at least, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in December.
Yours sincerely,
Jennifer Coutts Clay
New York
May 2003