22 | Pilot September 2017 http://www.pilotweb.aero
political ructions over escalating costs and
JFK’s responsibility for the Vietnam War. His
death made that unthinkable — America went
to the Moon to keep faith with its dead
President. At the actual age of seventeen
years and seven months I stayed up all night
to watch the Moon landing in black and white
on a grainy 405-line Bush TV a quarter of a
million miles away in Northumberland.
James Burke had led me by the hand
through the long build-up to every Apollo
launch, and I can’t hear the opening bars of
Also Sprach Zarathustra without being
transported back to that magical night. I
thought then that the Moon landing was
mankind’s greatest achievement, and I think
it still. Soon, half a century will have passed;
it seems like yesterday.
So in essence, war, genius, and political
vision got us from Kill Devil Hills to the Sea
of Tranquility in the short lifespan of a
not-very-old man. Since that day in 1969 we
seem to have lost our convictions. The
imperatives that drove us on are not what
they once seemed. It troubles me to note
that the next man on the moon won’t have
the vote. War, probably temporarily, is on the
back foot — the death of one soldier is
national news while, in 1916, 40,000 British
casualties in a single day was deemed
‘acceptable’. Genius smoulders on
everywhere. Sometimes the flames are
fanned by enterprise, sometimes they are
stifled by bureaucracy, but great ideas will
find their time. Political vision is absent — our
leaders today are purblind pygmies who do
things not because
they are hard, but
because they are easy.
But lest we lament,
consider this. We talk
of aviation because we
know and love it, but in
every sphere, mankind
is surfing an avalanche
of progress. Automotive
industries, chemical engineering and
pharmacology, health and biotech, computer
sciences, agriculture, above all in digital
technology, everyone can tell a story of
blindingly rapid ascent from darkness
towards the light. While we complain that
things are getting inexorably worse, they get
inexorably better. Mankind will continue to
take giant leaps, and I hope to stick around a
while longer to be dazzled by them.Space), and at the same time another
genius called Frank Whittle was dedicating
his life to proving the gas turbine for
aviation use. Then along came Hitler, and
what a kick in the backside that was for
aviation. We went into WWII with the
Gladiator and the Blenheim and came out
five years later with the Meteor, the
Vampire and the Sikorsky R4, while the
other side’s achievements included the
Me 163 and Me 262. SS Sturmbannführer
Von Braun’s first ballistic missile landed in
Staveley Road, Chiswick in 1944; later he
apologised, saying it had
“hit the wrong planet”.
Chuck Yeager took
the Bell X1 through the
sound barrier in 1947,
three months before
Orville Wright died.
Orville had last piloted
an aircraft in 1918 when
he flew a Wright Flyer
alongside a de Havilland DH4 to show how
far we’d come, but he lived long enough to
fly in a Lockheed Constellation, and when
he died four P-80 jets from Wright Air Force
Base flew in ‘missing man’ formation over
his grave.
Around the time I was actually born the
Americans flew the B-52, BOAC introduced
the Comet and we got the Vulcan, the
Victor and the Valiant. But the DH 110
tragedy at Farnborough seemed to puncture
British confidence; the Comet disasters
followed and the nexus of aviation
technology moved
away. Concorde was a
last spectacular
hurrah — we thought
the answer was
‘faster’ when it was
‘bigger’, and nobody
did bigger like Boeing.
I remember the
consternation of
Sputnik, Laika the dog, the exultation of Yuri
Gagarin in 1961, then John F Kennedy’s
extraordinary speech a month later in which
he pledged to go to the Moon before the
decade was out, ‘not because it is easy but
because it is hard’. We may have his
assassin Lee Harvey Oswald to thank for
Armstrong’s small step. It’s fair to postulate
that, had Kennedy lived, the Apollo
programme would have been cancelled amidA
s I write these words I am
precisely 65 years and seven
months old, and I have been
mulling over the meaning of this
day ever since I realised its
significance. I think it’s helped to bring
perspective to something I generally find
too amorphous to grasp, namely, the
progress of mankind. The significance of
my age is this: if I had been born on the
day Orville Wright flew the first powered
aircraft, today would be the day Neil
Armstrong walked on the Moon.
I’m not an old
man. As anyone who
has attained the age
of 65 years and
seven months will
tell you, the time
evaporates like snow.
One day you’re a kid,
the next you wake
up a pensioner
thinking... what the hell happened there? It
took us three million years to get from the
Rift Valley to Kitty Hawk, then the span of
my short life — the blink of an eye — to
graduate to mankind’s Giant Leap. Let’s
track back and figure out how we came so
far, so quickly.
Orville and Wilbur flew in 1903 but were
so far ahead of the rest of the world that
they had no real competition for five years.
Once the secret was out, the race was on.
Blériot flew the Channel in 1909, and two
years later Cal Rogers flew from New York
to Los Angeles in 49 days. Wilbur died of
typhoid in 1912 and what a loss that was...
the brothers were equals, but I think Wilbur
was more equal than Orville; what magic
might he have wrought?
If I’d been born in 1903 I’d just be going to
big school when the first world war broke
out and, energised by its momentum, we
progressed from the FB5 to the Vimy and
the Gotha in three years. At about the time
I’d be sitting my GCSEs, Albert Read and his
crew became the first men to fly the
Atlantic. A month later Alcock and Brown
did it non-stop, and eight years after that
Lindbergh flew the Atlantic alone. The
post-war ‘peace dividend’ slowed us up, but
men were still dreaming. In 1923 a twisted
genius called Wernher von Braun wrote a
paper called Die Rakete zu den
Planetenräumen (By Rocket into Planetary
The ascent of man
Wilbur died of
typhoid in 1912
and what a loss
that was...
We thought the
answer was
‘faster’ when it
was ‘bigger’
Regulars | Pat Malone
PAT MALONE
Pat has worked as a journalist on three
continents and is a fixed-wing pilot and former
helicopter instructor with 1,500 hours TT