Moments of clarity can be startling if only for their rarity in my case. But it’s precisely the surprise when innocent synapses are forged into meaningful new connections that makes those rare moments so memorable. I just never expected to have such an aviation episode while navigating my stairwell.
Certainly the setup was prosaic enough. I was out of town when my son, the one who’s always bringing treasures to be stored at headquarters, was presented with three handsome aviation models by the family of one of us recently gone west. Having no room in his one-bedroom apartment, seeing how it was already decorated with a wife, plus an infant son arriving any day, not to mention the mother-in-law aboard on temporary duty, he left the models in my well-regulated home.
I was still at large when my second son was aiding his mother in a yet more perfect regulation of our abode in preparation for a social gathering. Two of the models were thus crash-landed atop the flotsam heading up the stairwell while the model of the Wright Flyer was set on the amazingly yet unoccupied top of a small Victorian table temporarily situated a year ago on the mid-stair landing.
My harried return home saw me rushing past the airplane models in acknowledgment but without effect. However, when descending the stairs the next morning I turned on the landing to have the Wright Flyer on the Victorian table impact squarely in my gray matter. The effect was profound, even visceral. Although I had seen the Wright Flyer in the Smithsonian, and more appropriately via hundreds of viewings of that famous photograph of it breaking the surly bonds of its railroad runway for the first time, chancing across the Flyer on a Victorian backdrop was like seeing the Flyer for the first time.
In an instant I knew I was seeing the Flyer much more like it was, far more as an adult in 1903 would have seen it. In that moment all my learned notions of what an airplane looked like, every aspect of aviation I had ever known or experienced, were erased and I was looking at the Flyer as one who had never seen an airplane before, as a person just learning the idea of human flight—as a Victorian. And it made sense.
I was grateful for it making sense. As I suspect any of us so distant from the Victorian era would, I have always had an uneasiness viewing the Flyer. It’s too alien to fit any of our now ingrained concepts of an airplane; in fact the Flyer is so singular that no other aircraft has ever flattered it with similarity. It’s definitely a Wright brothers creation: dour, industrially devoid of decoration, a busy, unidentifiable jumble of lines and scallops strung together without the unifying solidity of a fuselage. Utterly devoid of streamlining, the cluttered Flyer requires minutes of study before an observer can discover its intent, and even then there’s a wonder that it flew at all.
And then I was standing in my stairwell, staring at a plastic model of the Wright Flyer sitting on an old table my grandfather had had.
It’s worth noting my sudden, fleeting perception was not without preliminaries. Out on the outskirts our family owns a tiny, broken-down Victorian house and I’ve logged my time sanding hundreds of decorative scrolls, pintles, balls, rosettes and other flourishes on what would otherwise be a simple entryway. So maybe my aesthetic is more primed to consider the origins of Victorian excess. It’s where the table came from in the first place.
More fundamentally, it took a few decades, but by early midlife I had realized every manmade object, and even natural ones I suppose, is both a product and a reflection of the era in which it was built and the attendant impossibility to relive or extend such eras once they have passed. People add on to houses and the effect always has a negative aspect, even when expertly done. Enthusiasts restore and modify old cars all the time—restomods—and the results vary from unfortunate to interesting, but the machine always loses its original heritage and gains a newer, more modern one. People build new houses and clothes and clock radios in old styles, but the result is never completely true to the era being re-created or the time of construction. The same holds for the airplanes we build and restore.
Does It Matter?
For a modern builder this doesn’t matter much. An RV getting riveted together today is going to look like 2025, and there’s not much a practical builder today is going to do about it or would care to change anyway. Perhaps this is partially true because from an airplane-building perspective, 2025 is a pretty good time. And RVs build upon near-timeless classical foundations.
The fun, it would seem, lays at the edges in the shadowy extremes of our thoughts. One could recall there was a time when cars towered with fins and sported large chromed breasts, which were admittedly pleasurable to polish. We’ve backed off from that now (at least on cars) and maybe for the better, although I’d say the white-black-silver blandness of our current wind-tunnel era, not to mention the overwhelming preponderance of black T-shirts, will pass largely unheralded into history. Methinks this will be remembered more as the tattoo era.
In aviation the dictates of physics play a greater role than the hand of the man in the marketing department, swept-back Cessna vertical tails notwithstanding. And so airplanes tend to look alike based more on their mission than anything else. Witness airliners; I defy the best plane spotter to say there’s any visual difference that matters between an Airbus and a Boeing. In aviation it’s more the mission the age appreciates than styling for marketing’s sake.
And so we build our planes for the mission, be that over-the-horizon buses to see the grandkids or agile flipsters for the single-seat acro addict. It’s interesting to consider how the missions have evolved, even from the not-so-distant past. Long-EZs, for example, don’t look quite as modern anymore. Is that because the form has been superseded by a superior layout or is it we simply see those planes as so “1980”? Maybe a little of both.
And so it comes down to the age we humans define and live in, and only the future gets the final vote on what we build today. While our future is more difficult to define than ever and it will have its own challenges, and we, after all, live here and now, I’d say it’s worth it to build something more beautiful, to strive above the utilitarian from time to time because our future selves seem to appreciate such efforts. Maybe the message is for all of us to form an age worth remembering.
