Flight

I know it’s a bit manipulative, but when somebody I meet while traveling asks where I’m from, I like to respond with “The home of aviation.” I enjoy the puzzled look on their faces before most say, “North Carolina?”

Then I tell them, no, not Kittyhawk, North Carolina, but Dayton, Ohio, the home of Orville Wright. Then I go on and tell them how Kittyhawk has great breezes and soft sand and was the perfect place to fly first, but Dayton is the place where The Wright Boys did their research and flight tables, designed working kites and planes, fabricated all for shipping on railroad cars to more sandy shores, and eventually perfected the controls that made flight practical while working locally out at Huffman Prairie, which is, by the way, the largest native grassland left in Ohio.

In any case, I’m proud to call Dayton my home town, too.

My town can now lay claim to the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Park, located on various campuses in the area. We’ve got one of the first agile aircraft Orville and Wilbur flew on display for years now over at Carillon Park. And we’ve got Wright Patterson Air Force Base and its continuing work on flight and space technology.

Perhaps the best venue we have that celebrates flight locally is the National Museum of the United States Air Force. It’s our hope that we land a retired space shuttle when all the flights are done next year. We’re hoping for Atlantis, the orbiter that flew more Air Force projects than any other. We’re keeping our fingers crossed. If you’ve never been or haven’t been for a while, you owe it to yourself to go to the museum. Besides, admission is free, though I bet you can’t make it through the gift shop without buying something.

I like to promote the local pride in flight with my grandkids by going to the museum. I’ve taken Noah to the Air Force Museum, as we still call it, countless times. He knows the place, perhaps, better than I do. I know for a fact he knows more details about aircraft. True, he doesn’t know as much as he thinks he knows at age 9, but he knows quite a bit. I figure as he matures his knowledge and humility will grow in equal measure.

We, in fact, were over at the museum just yesterday, along with my brother-in-law who grew up in Springfield, just down the road from here, but now calls Missoula, Montana home. Chris remembers visiting the museum when he was a kid and likes to stop by whenever he’s in town. As an auto mechanic, he’s got a thing for machines and engines. He knows one hell of a lot about historical aircraft, too.

At one point yesterday, though, while walking through the exhibits trying to figure out where Noah had gotten off to, I was struck with sadness. There was this beautiful Cold War era flying machine -- bristling with armaments. Somehow I had walked past a replica of the 'Fat Man' atomic bomb that devastated Nagasaki, on display in the shadow of Bockscar, the actual aircraft that dropped The Bomb on that Japanese city, without thinking about it too much. By the time I got back to the more recent retired aircraft, though, it got to me.

I know there is evil in the world. I recognize that sometimes wars have to be fought. I accept that people have to die.

But I am also struck with the news we get now and then of an errant cruise missile that misses the bad guys and blows up a school or a wedding party or some other peaceful gathering of people just trying to make their way in a war-torn country. It bothers me, too, that when we count war dead in this day and age, we only count our dead: our soldiers, our contractors, and our civilians. Back in the Vietnam era, we always heard about Vietcong body counts. How many enemy soldiers bought it today? Somehow those numbers made our own losses more palatable.

Now, however, we don’t hear much about the death toll on the other side, whether military or civilian. Maybe we’ll hear about something broadcast on Al Jezeera from time to time, but overall, it is about our losses, not theirs.

There has been so much death from the sky over the last century since Orville and Wilbur perfected control at Huffman Prairie. I’m still proud of those boys and what they did. The machines created and improved since then using their ideas have been wonders, indeed. Still, the death and destruction humanity rains on enemies today from these technical works of art that have taken to the sky is enough to make a person stop and wonder if the cost for humanity has been worth it. Sure makes it easier when war fought in our name doesn’t provide us with the knowledge of who’s hurting and how much.

Today’s elder idea: Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense of theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.

Dwight D. Eisenhower