I'm A Little Airplane

Singing children running through fields with arms outstretched, kids flying kites, and youngsters folding paper airplanes all are following in the tradition of inventors around the world who looked up at birds and tried to imitate their ability to fly.

     We know the Greek myth of Icarus whose feather and wax wings melted when he flew too close to the sun. In Renaissance Italy, Leonardo da Vinci, who designed an airplane but lacked an engine to fly it, had such respect for the birds his design mimicked that he bought the caged birds he saw in Florence in order to set them free.

     Birds have inspired the realistic drawings of John James Audubon and the new stylized paintings of Dutch artist, Jeroen Allart. Gardeners plant a mix of trees, shrubs, grasses, vines, and flowers to attract a variety of bird species and to protect them while they feed. Guided by experts from World Birders (worldbirders.com) in the UK, bird watchers, known as birders, travel the globe to see as many species as possible, especially those that are endangered.

     Earthbound people have found ways for birds to help them. As far back as 2200 B.C. there is mention of the Chinese use of trained falcons. Marshaling their birds' speed to fly high, dive onto prey, and kill with beak and sharp talons, hunters have taken to the field with falcons and hawks to procure a wide variety of game birds, hares, and even small deer and wolves.

     During wars, soldiers have used the natural instinct of pigeons to return to a home loft to carry messages that deceived the enemy (Read Double Cross by Ben Macintyre). Today, drones (See The Art of Intelligence by Henry A. Crumpton) and the robotic spy drones that are shaped like hummingbirds seem somewhat like descendants of the homing pigeon.

     Nowadays, kids who send messages in helium-filled balloons follow in the tradition of the French Montgolfier brothers who showed people they could fly by filling a large silk bag with heated air in 1783. Flying balloons drifted at the mercy of wind and air currents until the Brazilian, Alberto Santos-Dumont, powered his dirigible, or airship, with a gasoline engine in 1898. Germans used dirigibles in World War I, and, when the war ended, airships began to carry passengers across the Atlantic Ocean. Famously, the Germans' hydrogen-filled Hindenburg burst into flames in 1937.

    The Pilot and the Little Prince by Peter Sis not only tells young readers 6 to 8 years old about the life of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of The Little Prince, but also covers the early days of aviation. In the years following the brief flight of Orville and Wilbur Wright in 1903, military, passenger, mail, and freight use of airplanes and helicopters has expanded. There have been constant improvements in engines, pilot and flight attendant training, flame resistant plane interiors, safety regulations, and "black boxes" used to determine what went wrong in the case of crashes. All these areas present career opportunities for young people interested in aviation. (Those interested in a career in space, might enjoy my earlier post, "Space Explorers.")

     Understanding the broad appeal of flight, even to those whose career interests are not in aviation, filmmakers have tapped a variety of sources to make Superman movies, tie balloons to a chair to go Up, create a flying suit for Iron Man, and play on national stereotypes in Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines. Disney/Pixar's film, Planes, has inspired a line of remote control planes, such as Mattel's Dusty Crophopper.