102'

Flying is a most unique activity - even more so when you consider that man has no earthly business gallivanting through the skies.  If he did, some argue, then man would have been granted wings - as birds were.  And yet, throughout history, man has obsessed with conquering frontier after frontier - driven by a desire to take what is not ours or otherwise establish dominion over all that the sun touches.  These early conquests, mythological or otherwise, were not without peril; Icarus flew too close to the sun, de Rozier and Romain misjudged their vaulting of the English Channel, Selfridge smashed his skull in Virginia, Bague vanished into thin air somewhere over the Mediterranean. Their ghosts were only the first.  Whether by wax wing, balloon, dirigible or airplane, history is littered with the bodies of pioneer aviators who launched into the unknown and paid the ultimate price. 

1st Lieutenant Thomas E. Selfridge, U.S. Signal Corps.  He was the first man to die in the crash of a powered airplane - a Wright Flyer piloted by Orville Wright.  He was 26.

We must also acknowledge that man, while having attained great heights is, in the grand scheme, a relative neophyte.  This is shockingly obvious when we consider that we went from Kitty Hawk to the moon in 66 years.
66 years.
In the history of the world, it's but a spark.  And yet, this spark lit a raging inferno of ingenuity and discovery fuelled throughout history by courage bordering on foolhardiness.
I've had this thought as a passenger riding in the pressurized aluminum tube of an airliner at 33,000 feet.  I'm scraping the stratosphere, riding through the sky in a chair and taking mere hours to cover distances that frankly, not that long ago, took weeks if not months.  What would the world look like if, in the early days of flight, pioneers and dreamers gave in to the howls of protest incited by daily (and fatal) airplane crashes?  And what if those carrying the torch through the jet age, when faced with Comets falling from the sky in pieces, threw their hands up in surrender and walked away?  And when Apollo 1 burned on the launch pad at Cape Kennedy? And Challenger?
A lesser kind would have quit - accepting our fate as an earthbound one.
It's the same thought I'm having now as the Smith and I cruise eastward over the Ottawa River on another calm and smooth evening.
Flying is magical. 
Yes, I know it's far more technical that that. I can explain how a curved surface passing through the air generates lift and how you can simulate the same by sticking your hand out of a moving car's window; Bernoulli, fluid dynamics, differences in pressure and all that.  In the end, it's just words - words that fall hopelessly short of describing what people living barely 200 years ago would have described as sorcery.

The 1903 Wright Flyer at the Kill Devil Hills near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina during the first manned and powered flight on December 17, 1903.  Orville is at the controls as Wilbur runs alongside.

All this started with a flight of just 102 feet above some sand dunes in North Carolina - Orville keeping the Wright Flyer barely airborne for 12 seconds.  Almost 66 years later, Neil Armstrong set foot on the surface of the moon and laboriously uttered the famous line "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind".  The significance of Kitty Hawk wasn't lost on Armstrong either.  He carried a piece of wood from the Flyer's left propeller and a swatch of fabric from its wing.
In the year 2016 - a little more than a century after that first flight - the Smith and I exist somewhere in between.  Cloth helmet and goggles...in the Space Age.  The evidence is all around us.  Over my left shoulder, about a dozen hot air balloons follow the wind - forming a brightly coloured line stretching south-west towards the city.  They brighten and dim as they are either flushed by the sun or lit by the burner flame that helps keep them aloft.  Far above, a pair of razor thin white lines carve the troposphere - contrails from a passenger jet carrying its charge to far off places.   As soon as the airliner lays them out, they begin to billow and widen to give the appearance of long feather tails.  The sun paints them deep purple and pink.  Still beyond and still unseen, are hundreds if not thousands of satellites racing around the earth, tiny blinking lights streaking across an indigo field at speeds we still struggle to comprehend.
I know my true insignificance in this breathtaking immensity when a seagull coasts by overhead.  Treason.  Upstaged by my namesake. 
There is one yet below my lowly station.  Alow, perhaps some five or six hundred feet distant, is a powered parachute.  It's a lawn chair mated to a two-stroke engine suspended beneath a purple canopy.  He's cruising leisurely above the smooth surface of the river - also eastbound but at a much slower speed. 
Now, my craft, while designed in the 50s, is closely related to the open-cockpit flying of the Great War.  My compatriot's, while of a much newer vintage, is far more reminiscent of the Wright's first forays into aviation - with the pilot laid bare to the onrushing winds and whatever elements they may bring. 
As the balloons fade away in the southwest, the jet continues its journey to an unknown and far flung place and the satellites criss-cross madly far above, I feel the Smith's comforting hum of life coursing through the stick and throttle, up my arms and into my chest.  I keep my eyes on the powered parachute below and circle lazily overhead.  I measure my turns to shadow him as he drifts eastward above the river and have cause to wonder what would this world be like if not for the 102 feet at Kitty Hawk on a windy December day?

Landing runway 09 at Rockcliffe - 103 years after Kitty Hawk.  (Photo Courtesy: Chuck Clark)