A Journal from the One Hundredth Year
of Human Aviation
In January 2003, an F-117 stealth bomber flew over the Wright brothers monument at Kitty Hawk to celebrate the centennial anniversary of human flight. That same year, an aircraft carrier called the USS Kitty Hawk arrived in the Persian Gulf, where it launched forty Tomahawk cruise missiles meant to kill Saddam Hussein. Those attacks were followed by around-the-clock bombing raids by fighter jets launched from the flight deck of the Kitty Hawk. At the time, I was following a website called Iraqibodycount, which reported that between six thousand and seventy-eight hundred Iraqis—excluding soldiers—had been killed by the American armed forces.
That same month, I cut out and pasted in my journal a small newspaper picture, shot in profile, of a Polish girl at an antiwar rally in Warsaw. She had painted bombs in place of tears falling down her left cheek. Next to her picture, I wrote this from Henry Adams’s essay “The Law of Acceleration”: “Bombs educate vigorously, and . . . airships might require the reconstruction of society.” Adams wrote his essay at the same time Wilbur and Orville Wright were figuring out the science of human flight. Yet it is clear that Adams knew nothing of the Wrights’ experiments, since by “airship” he meant a zeppelin held aloft by helium instead of a glider propelled by gasoline. But he did have the kind of mind that could leap ahead to a time when bombs and planes—and planes as bombs—would forever be linked. Nothing so much as the history of flight illustrates Adams’s law of acceleration, which says that human civilization is careening into the future with an ever-increasing speed that we are powerless to stop. The speed by which technological society advances can be measured by squaring the achievements of the last generation—that was Adams’s formula. There was unquestionably a “vertiginous violence” associated with such acceleration, said Adams, but he believed the modern mind could harness that force and use it for good. “At the rate of progress since 1800,” wrote Adams, “every American who lived into the year 2000 would know how to control unlimited power. He would think in complexities unimaginable to an earlier mind.”
But alas we don’t, and we don’t.
That first human flight actually took place on December 17, 1903. The Wright brothers had been in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, since September, assembling the machine they had come to call the Flyer. By December, they were still repairing propeller shafts that had twisted loose under the torque of a grinding engine. Stores were running low: their supper was crackers; breakfast was rice cakes. On the twelfth, the shafts were finally ready. The thirteenth was a Sunday, and the brothers had promised their father, a retired bishop of the United Brethren Church, that they would keep the Sabbath holy. So on the fourteenth, they laid their sixty-foot launching rail down along a gently sloped dune. They flipped a coin, and Wilbur won the toss. He crawled into the hip cradle on the lower wing. Orville cranked the engine, and their mechanized bird, with its forty-foot wingspan and a gasoline engine, started down the runner. Six feet from the end of the track, the Flyer rose into the air. Wilbur had hoped to take it eight miles, to the village of Kitty Hawk. But he over-adjusted the elevator pulley, and the Flyer sank back to earth 105 feet from takeoff. As far as the brothers were concerned, this didn’t count as flight.
The next two days were taken up with repairs to the undercarriage. Then, on the seventeenth, despite strong headwinds, Orville was eager for his turn between the diaphanous wings. Four men from a nearby lifesaving station came to watch. Orville settled into the cradle, and as the Flyer started forward, Wilbur ran alongside his brother, holding the right wing in balance. The Flyer rose again, tilted left, leveled out, dipped, rose, then dipped again, this time skidding into the sand. The flight lasted twelve seconds, reached an altitude of ten feet, and covered 120 feet.
Then, at high noon, Wilbur crawled back into the cradle. Again the Flyer rose, this time to fifteen feet, and again it began to pitch convulsively. It dipped to an altitude of one foot. But about three hundred feet from the start, Wilbur pulled the plane under control. It rose to ten feet and leveled off. He sailed for five hundred more feet over the open coast. This, unquestionably, was flight—the first human-powered flight in the history of the world.
One day when I was seven, I came home from school certain, for some reason, that I had solved the problem of motorless human flight. I cut a crude pair of wings from two plastic garbage bags and wrapped them around my arms. Then I climbed up onto the roof of my parents’ house and jumped. Fortunately, we lived in a ranch-style house. I fell only about ten feet before landing in a dense row of arborvitae. When my mother saw the scratches on my face, I eventually confessed to my Icarian fall.
“If it was that easy,” she said in disgust, “don’t you think someone else would have already figured it out?”
In his journals, now lost, the French aviator Roland Garros wrote ecstatically about the strange longing in children to fly, perhaps to fly away. Flight is escape—either from the laws of gravity or from the laws of the tribe. Or the family. My family was made up of fundamentalist Christians, and gradually I would come to feel that doctrine pressing down on me like the most oppressive law of gravity. It took many years to unburden myself of those laws. I began searching noncanonical Christian texts for a version of Christianity that might not repulse me. One such text was the apocryphal Acts of Peter, where I discovered the arch heretic Simon Magus. No one in the literature of the New Testament—canonical and apocryphal—comes in for so much abuse. His sensuous cosmology seemed to me a healthy corrective to the asceticism and the piety of the Baptist churches I grew up on. It went like this: Out of an unfathomable silence—the source of all sources—there rose the mind (Nous), and out of the masculine mind sprang the feminine thought (Ennoia). From this androgynous coupling, the world came into being. But the creatures of the world famously misbehaved. Ennoia, therefore, descended to the world in an attempt to set things right. But instead, she was imprisoned inside the human flesh of Helena, the whore of Tyre, then later inside Helen, the instigator of much Greek misfortune. Nous then descended into the realm of being to reunite with Ennoia. Simon Magus claimed that he was Nous and that the questionable woman with whom he traveled was none other than Helen, Ennoia.
According to the Acts of Peter, Jesus’s strong-willed disciple loathed the flesh as much as Simon Magus reveled in it. This became the basis of their antipathy. In one of Peter’s earliest acts, a gardener asked him to offer a prayer for his only daughter, a virgin. Immediately, the girl fell dead. Peter explained to the grievous father that his daughter had been delivered from the “shamelessness of the flesh.” But her father, failing to see the divine blessing in Peter’s act, begged him to bring his daughter back to life. This Peter did, but only before ending his cautionary tale with this damning detail: a stranger soon visited the home of the old gardener and seduced his daughter. The two were never seen again.
But Simon Magus was apparently as skilled a sorcerer as Peter. He too could strike a boy dead by whispering in his ear, then bring him back to life, as he supposedly did in front of a coliseum crowd. But what really rattled Peter were the rumors coming from Rome that Simon could fly. And sure enough, when Peter arrived in Rome with the intent of exposing Simon for a sham, he met a large crowd that had gathered on the Sacred Way. They were all staring skyward, where Simon was at that moment doing figure eights above the plane trees. Occasionally he would dip down toward the crowd to hurl some invective at his rival. Peter, for his part, raised up a quick prayer, pleading with his lord that if Simon’s flight was not immediately brought to a tragic halt, then all of Rome would be lost to Christendom. “Let him fall from this great height, Lord, and be crippled by his fall,” Peter pleaded. And suddenly, like a glider hitting a crosswind, Simon plunged to earth. He broke one leg in three places, and when a doctor named Castor tried to operate, Simon did not survive the procedure.
It must be said, however, that Peter’s victory in Rome proved short-lived. When he convinced the concubines of the prefect Agrippa to adopt a life of chastity, the prefect had Peter put to death.
So ends the Acts of Peter.
On the first day of the second Iraq War, I drove to the Daniel Boone Forest in eastern Kentucky and walked until that manmade thing, the state, disappeared and was replaced by chestnut oaks and sandstone outcrops. I made my camp in a small clearing beneath the constellation Orion. I fell asleep listening to the barred owl and woke up to the distant drumming of the ruffed grouse. That drumming, in fact, might be a clue to how animals ever took to the air in the first place. A transitional fossil form that is half bird and half dinosaur was discovered in a German limestone quarry in 1860. Like the grouse’s cousin the chukar partridge, the winged dinosaur may have used its wings for propulsion while running, until one day, when trying to run faster, it took to the air—first in short hops, like the Wright brothers, and then finally in a long careening glide.
Two things fascinate us about birds: they can fly and they can sing. No other animals really come close in either department. When the wood thrush, a bird with a beautiful song, migrates back to Kentucky, he flies by night, guided by the fixed north star and laminar winds. Then he waits for the female to arrive before he breaks into a tremolo that is purer than that of any other passerine that migrates to these deciduous woods.
Birds sing because they can, both physiologically and territorially. They have developed a sophisticated voice box, the syrinx. Though the song gives away their whereabouts, few predators can climb into the sky after them. They sing to woo and warn, to breed and defend territory. Each song is essentially an improvisation on the standard of that species, and the female will often choose her mate based on how eloquently he can improvise. Some ornithologists have even ventured out on a thin limb to suggest that birds sing because of sheer pleasure in the world as they find it at sunrise. What birds definitely do not sing is what W. E. B. Dubois called the sorrow-song. The mourning dove is not really mourning. The loon is not really going crazy from lovesickness. In Walt Whitman’s eulogy for President Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in Dooryard Bloom’d,” a thrush has withdrawn into “the swamp in secluded recesses” to mourn the slain leader:
Song of the bleeding throat,
Death’s outlet song of life, (for well dear brother I know,
If thou was not granted to sing thou would’st surely die.)
But of course it is Whitman’s heart that is bleeding, not the thrush’s syrinx. Whitman, not the thrush, is singing death’s outlet song. The thrush will not die if it doesn’t sing, though he might die alone. Rather, it is our species that needs to shape heartbreak into something that will help us bear it. Only we, the animals who can comprehend our own death, hope for a savior we might rise up to meet “on the wings of a great speckled bird.”
Perhaps song and flight are so intimately bound in our species-consciousness because we first learned to sing from the birds. Consider a Kaluli legend from Papua New Guinea in which a boy trolls for crayfish with his sister. She catches some; he none. The boy begs his sister for one of her crayfish, but she refuses. So the boy catches a shrimp and pinches it over his nose until it turns the reddish purple of the muni bird’s beak. He stretches out his arms, which turn into wings, and the boy flies away. His sister begs her brother to come back, but he replies, “Your crayfish you did not give me. I have no sister.”
The American poet Nathaniel Mackey has read into this story the origin of music. “For the Kaluli, the quintessential source of music is the orphan’s ordeal,” wrote Mackey. “Song is both a complaint and a consolation dialectically tied to that ordeal.” The musical harmony replaces the social harmony that has been stolen from the estranged singer. And yet many anthropologists suspect that music, allied with the communal dance, first served the evolutionary purpose of establishing social harmony among Homo sapiens through acoustic harmony. In addition, the repetition of acoustic patterns made the tribe’s stories mnemonically easier to remember. Still, at some point, that sense of belonging to the social unit is denied someone, such as the Kaluli boy, who then turns to a new song, the orphan’s song—the blues. Such a song now becomes at once a cry of woundedness and a wanting to be taken back. Our words state the wound while the music heals it.
In their own hometown, the Wright brothers suffered the famous treatment of prophets. Five men had witnessed the first human flight at Kitty Hawk. The brothers telegrammed their father back in Dayton, Ohio, and told him to alert the media. But when Frank Tunison, the editor of the Dayton Journal, heard that Wilbur had flown for almost a minute, he was startlingly unimpressed. “Fifty-seven seconds?” he is reported to have said. “If it had been fifty-seven minutes, then it might have been a news item.” In truth, the country had been waiting for Samuel Langley’s experiments, funded by the War Department, to solve the problem of human flight. Soon Langley would be catapulting his flyers over the Potomac River, only to watch them dive ingloriously into the water. But that a couple of midwestern bicycle mechanics had beaten Langley into the air—certainly that was just another hoax.
After their return to Dayton, the brothers got the permission of Torrance Huffman to let them build a second Flyer on his farm on the outskirts of town, where they might perfect their circling techniques and lengthen their time in the air. Dayton’s interurban trolley ran alongside Huffman’s pasture, and from time to time, passengers caught a glimpse of Flyer no. 2 rounding the large honey locust in the middle of the field. Still the press stayed away. The brothers stretched their flight time to five minutes, covering three miles of figure eights. According to Dayton journalist Fred Kelly, “Most of the long flights in late September and October, 1905, had been seen by Amos Stauffer, a farmer working in an adjoining field. But he went right ahead husking corn.” Apparently, if the fall of Icarus went unnoticed by Bruegel’s plowman, so it seems did his ascent.
Sixty years ago, the inventor of modern French poetry, Blaise Cendrars, began writing again. He had stopped three years earlier after his son Remy, a pilot with the British Royal Air Force, was shot down and killed in the Battle of Stalingrad. A man suspected of Jewish sympathies, Cendrars escaped to Aix-en-Provence, where he hid in a room next door to a Gestapo informer. There Cendrars began burning all his papers, until it occurred to him that a writer with no evidence of writing would seem as suspicious as one hiding a manuscript of Chez l’armee anglaise. He began to visit the library in La Mejanes to give himself an alibi.
Three years earlier, when Remy had visited his father in Paris, Cendrars had gone looking for a saint’s medal depicting Joseph of Copertino. Cendrars had decided that Joseph, a Franciscan monk who, it was said, had levitated more than seventy times during his life, would be the saint best suited to look after Remy.
But when Cendrars told Remy of his search for a Saint Joseph, Remy recoiled: “Oh, shit! The patron saint of exams!”
“The man himself,” said Cendrars.
This requires some explaining. Joseph of Copertino was a cobbler’s son. Of twelve children, Joseph was the only one who could not manage a decent boot. When one day Joseph nailed his thumb to the workbench, the cobbler dragged his son to the local monastery and pleaded with the Friars Minor to take him into their order as an oblate. The friars reluctantly agreed to accept Joseph and gave him the task of caring for the order’s mule. This was 1625.
Joseph’s acumen did not improve. Of all the prayers, the only word he could remember was “Amen!” Yet by some miracle, the Minor Conventuals of Osimo decided to admit Joseph as a novitiate. Three years later, when it came time for Joseph to take the examination for admission into the priesthood, he simply replied, “Amen!” to every question. His examiners took this as a sign of unaffected profundity, and Joseph of Copertino was ordained a priest in 1628. As a result, and to Remy’s horror, sometime over the next three hundred years, Joseph became known as the patron saint of exams. But even more curious is what happened after Joseph passed the exam. When he started home to tell his parents the news, Joseph suddenly felt his feet leaving the ground! In the next moment, he found himself floating in front of his disbelieving parents. Thinking that he had somehow embarrassed them, Joseph flew away.
Blaise Cendrars never found a Saint Joseph medal for Remy. But in September 1943, while in hiding, he came across a newspaper clipping that announced that Joseph of Copertino had been named the patron saint of American aviators. It was then, three years after Remy’s death, that Cendrars began writing again. At the library in La Mejanes, he began sifting through hagiographies, trying to reconstruct the life of Joseph of Copertino.
After that first flight from his parents’ house, Joseph joined the Franciscans at Assisi. There, the smallest thing, like the way light fell on a lamb’s ear, could send Joseph airborne. Once he pulled a gardener up into the air with him, and the two of them spun there for several minutes above the anemones and hibiscus. Often, when reciting the liturgy, Joseph would rise up to the tabernacle and hover there until his superior ordered him down. One day, unaccountably, he flew into the refractory brandishing a sea urchin.
When it came to the attention of the Holy Office that Joseph had been preaching sermons on humility while hovering above an olive tree, he was summoned to Naples on “suspicion of wizardry.” Standing before the judges, Joseph felt so unworthy that he tried to throw himself at their feet. Instead, he rose helplessly into the air until at last, he was bumping against the high ceiling, where he could no longer hear the accusations of his examiners. Nevertheless, they censured Joseph for the sin of pride and ordered him to retire to an isolated monastery at Fossombrone. People flocked there to catch a glimpse of the flying monk, and an entire town of hotels and taverns grew up around the monastery. Joseph was transferred from one cell of isolation to another, until he was eventually sent back to his original convent in Osimo, where he died in 1663 at the age of sixty.
Cendrars, for his part, eventually turned all the material he had gathered about Saint Joseph into a wartime memoir called The Patron Saint of Aviation. It is a collage text—part allegory, part elegy, part apocalypse. The saddest moment comes when Cendrars reads that the American flyers have adopted Joseph as their patron saint. “My dear little Saint Joseph!” he exclaims—by which we must understand him to have meant, “My dear lost Remy!”
Before a Parisian crowd, in October 1906, a Brazilian named Alberto Santos-Dumont flew a distance of seven hundred feet in a strange-looking contraption made out of box kite cells. Unlike Wilbur Wright’s seven-hundred-foot flight three years earlier, news of this one spread quickly across Europe and to the United States. This time, President Roosevelt took note and suggested that his War Department reestablish contact with the two brothers from Ohio who said they had built a flying machine. In early 1908, a contract was written up: a trial flight would be held in September, and if it proved a success, the United States would pay $25,000 cash for one Flyer. The Wrights had also worked out a deal with France that would earn them $100,000 for one Flyer and lessons. An official French trial would be held in the fall. In this way, the brothers would simultaneously reveal their invention on two continents.
Wilbur arrived in France in May 1908. From the beginning, the Parisian press raised suspicions about the flights at Kitty Hawk and instead lauded the accomplishments of a Frenchman, Louis Bleriot, who had flown six miles in a single-wing craft. Wilbur set up shop at a racecourse in Le Mans, where he began to assemble the Flyer. But on July 4, while he was running the engine at 1,500 rpm, a hose burst and sprayed Wilbur’s left arm with scalding water. The accident was reported in the papers, but Wilbur refused to show his wounds to photographers, leading to further speculation that the Wrights were mounting an elaborate hoax. Wilbur still let no one see the Flyer, and he slept beside it every night in the shed hangar to guard against interlopers.
Finally, at the beginning of August, Wilbur said that he was healthy enough to fly. On the eighth, papers announced that he might fly that day. Spectators began to fill the wooden bleachers early at the racecourse in Le Mans. Wilbur ordered the Flyer to be lifted onto the rails of the catapult that would launch his flight. Around five in the afternoon, he emerged from the hangar in a gray suit and tie. He climbed into the pilot seat, cranked the engine, and before the crowd quite realized what had happened, Wilbur Wright had shot into the air and was flying. A cheer went up. At thirty feet, Wilbur tilted the left wing by shifting his hips and banked for a tight turn. The crowd shrieked, thinking the Flyer was falling. But when Wilbur leveled off and sailed over the grandstand, wild cheering began again. (The next day he would perform a figure eight to even wilder applause.) Wilbur circled the racecourse a few times and then coolly landed the Flyer. The crowd flooded out of the stands to shake Wilbur’s hand and shout congratulations. Louis Bleriot wandered among them, stunned and bewildered. Another Italian aviator, Leon Delagrange, who had once kept a lumbering plane up for fifteen minutes, told a reporter, “We are beaten! We just don’t exist!”
Orville Wright succeeded his brother’s triumph in France with a fifty-seven-minute flight over the army grounds at Fort Myer in Washington, D.C., thus securing their American contract. Back in France, Wilbur extended the record to two hours and twenty minutes, at an altitude of 300 feet. When he landed, the French minister of public works told Wilbur that the French government would award him and Orville the Legion of Honor.
Back in Washington, on June 10, 1909, Wilbur and Orville were greeted by President William Howard Taft as guests of honor at the White House. Before an audience of a thousands, Taft praised the brothers’ persistence and humility. He closed with the hope that the flying machine would be used for the benefit of all nations and not as an implement of war.
Cendrars, in The Patron Saint of Aviation, contended that Joseph of Copertino was the only saint to ever fly backward. While the hagiography does indeed bear this out, we might still give some philosophical consideration to another backward-flying enigma—Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History. In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin meditates on Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus, in which he sees an angel with open wings contemplating some object in the distance. This, Benjamin decides, is how we should imagine the Angel of History: wings spread, moving away from us, his eyes staring back. He is looking into the past. But “where we perceive a chain of events,” wrote Benjamin, “he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.” The angel wants to return, to “make whole what is smashed.” But a storm is blowing him into the future, and the storm is called Progress.
Klee’s angel is to Benjamin what Joseph of Copertino was to Cendrars—a patron saint that cannot, ultimately, save us. The technological winds blow too strong. The angel has been replaced by the airplane, in which the poet’s son is shot down by another airplane. The airplane comes to embody the Angel of History, carrying us so fast into the future that we can no longer stop to question the force that sweeps us along and goes by the name Progress.
In the most vivid dream I ever remember having, my grandfather the Baptist minister and I are arguing over the true message of the Gospels. He maintains that Christ died for our sins so that we might enter the kingdom of God. I say that the kingdom of God already exists, spread out before us, and we have only to recognize the holy within ourselves to enter it. My grandfather demands that I offer proof of my apostasy. To my surprise, I respond by rising into the air.
In the fall of 1909, New York City was planning to celebrate the three hundredth anniversary of the year Henry Hudson sailed his schooner the Half Moon into New York Harbor. A huge flotilla of naval vessels would parade along the Hudson River. The world’s most famous ship, the Lusitania, was scheduled to make an appearance. And for the main attraction, Wilbur Wright had agreed (for $15,000) to launch the Flyer onto the uncertain winds above the river.
He made the long and narrow Governors Island his base of operations. The Statue of Liberty stood a mile to the west on Bedloe’s Island. Wilbur could make his flight anytime he deemed the winds favorable. He had only to send up a signal flag to let crowds and residents along the river know his intentions. A half million people massed along the Brooklyn shore on September 29 when the catapult weight dropped, launching Wilbur lightly into the air. Wilbur circled the island once to furious applause, then climbed to two hundred feet and headed north. At that moment, the Lusitania had drawn abreast the Statue of Liberty. When the captain was told that the Flyer was in the air, he slowed the engines and called his two thousand passengers onto the decks. They arrived to see a man in a flying machine swooping down in a slow arc around the statue’s waist. Then Wilbur tilted the Flyer and circled under the upraised torch before gliding once more around the metal drapery at the statue’s waist. As Wilbur headed back toward Governors Island, he passed over the Lusitania and gazed down at the screaming throng. The captain leaned on the foghorn and a salutatory bellow rose up around Wilbur.
On October 4, Wilbur went up again, and this time he sailed south toward battleships anchored in the harbor. He flew over the British cruisers the Drake and the Argyll and then shot across the bow of the American Mississippi. When reporters asked the Mississippi’s captain, William Simms, about the Flyer’s military potential, Simms replied that “the aviator’s chance of dropping anything on a battleship would be small.”
On December 17, 2003, a crowd of around forty thousand gathered on Kill Devil Hill to watch pilot Kevin Kochersberger celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of human flight with a reenactment of the first ascent. The plan to synchronize exactly with Orville Wright’s short 10:35 A.M. flight was scratched due to rain. Instead, the US commander in chief, who had flown in on Air Force One, stood up and strung together platitudes and empty phrases. “The United States will always be the first in flight,” he concluded. Polite applause followed. The chief executive did not remind the crowd of President Taft’s desire to see the airplane used for the good of all nations, and not for war. Instead he listed the aeronautical advances of the past century, including space flight and supersonic speed. He did not mention the Columbia disaster ten months earlier, or the planes that had flown into the Twin Towers, or the thousands of American smart bombs that had missed their targets in Iraq. Progress, we are to believe, moves only in one direction, and in one dimension.
Around 2 P.M., Kochersberger’s crew, dressed in period hats and black suits, rolled their replica of the Flyer out onto a stretch of sand beneath Kill Devil Hill. Two men cranked the propellers, and the biplane, with its forty-foot-long cloth wings, started off. It lurched a few inches into the air, then splashed down in a puddle a foot past the end of the rail. Commentators read into this failure a story of how truly spectacular the Wright flight must have been. But we might also read it as a parable about how little distance, morally speaking, our technology has actually traveled.
Walter Benjamin combined the Marxism of the Frankfurt School and the Kabbalist mysticism of Gershom Scholem to arrive at a singular theory of history whereby the plodding, linear flow of secular time could at any moment be derailed and turned into a messianic fullness of time, wherein our alienation from nature, from language, from our labor, from one another, would be instantly resolved. Revolution, for Benjamin, meant a transformation of the idea of historical, technological progress into a “now-time,” an eternal present where the question of progress makes no sense. For Benjamin, true progress meant an escape from history. In this context, the airplane became one of Benjamin’s “dialectical images.” That is to say, it stood for the German Messerschmitt Me 262 fighter jets that were strafing London, and also for Leonardo’s ornithopter, which the inventor had designed to fetch snow from the Alps to be scattered over the summer streets of Florence. One brings relief; the other death. But, said Benjamin, the innocence of Leonardo’s invention still lurks within the image of the fighter jet, just as we can still hear echoes of the word ornithopter in the terrifying phrase helicopter gunship. Benjamin’s faith was such that, like Henry Adams, he felt certain that once the savage evidence was in, the world would see how the bombers had betrayed Leonardo’s dream. The world would see what a sham the century of flight had become. That realization would mark the true moment of revolution.