Representations of Flight and Aviation

IEEE technology & society magazine, 2024

Revised and adapted as Chapter 2 of my book Imagining Flight: Aviation and Popular Culture (2003)

Breathless announcements of the Next Big Thing, and glittering promises about how it will Change Your Life are part of everyday life in the late 20th century. Yet—if you take the long view—that state of affairs is unusual. The idea that you can forecast technological change only makes sense if you think of it as a constant, ongoing part of life. The idea that you’d want to only makes sense if technology changes fast enough for your audience to see the future you’re describing. Broadly speaking, that makes technological forecasting a pastime of the industrialized world in the 20th century. Powered flight became possible at just about the time citizens of the industrialized world began to find technological forecasts interesting. Not surprisingly, a great deal of ink was expended imagining the future of flight. Between 1900 and 1915 alone, the subject inspired novels, short stories, poetry, paintings, and scores of magazine articles—the latter not just in specialized titles, but in the likes of Harper’s Weekly and The North American Review. These forecasts—like most technological forecasts from years past—are interesting not for being right or wrong but for being revealing. They are windows into the early workings of the aviation business, into the minds of the writers who produced them, and into the workings of the societies (for my purposes, Britain and America) that produced them, fa"

Memorie Della Societa Astronomica Italiana, 2008

The paper is an overview of the Human attempt to fly, from the myth of Daedalus and his son Icarus to the first "aerostatic" experiment by Joseph-Michel and Jaques-Etienne Montgolfier. Then, via a jump of about 200 years, we arrive to the era of the modern stratospheric ballooning that, from the beginning of the last century, have provided a unique flight opportunity for aerospace experiments. In particular, the Italian scientific community has employed stratospheric balloons since the '50s for cosmic rays and high energy astrophysical experiments with initial launches performed from Cagliari Helmas Airport (Sardinia). More recently an almost ideal location was found in the area of Trapani-Milo (Sicily, Italy), were an old abandoned airport was refurbished to be used as a new launch site that became operative at the beginning of the '70s. Finally, we suggest a short reminiscence of the first transatlantic experiment carried out on August 1975 in collaboration between SAS-CNR (Italy) and NSBF-NASA (USA). The reason why the Long Duration Balloon has been recently reoriented in a different direction is analysed and future perspectives discussed. Finally, the spirit of the balloon launch performed by the Groups lead by Edoardo Amaldi, Livio Scarsi and other Italian pioneers, with payloads looking like "refrigerators" weighting a few tens of kg is intact and the wide participation to the present Workshop is the clear demonstration.

2012

CHOICE magazine, June 2013

American Aviation Historical Society (AAHS) Journal, 2017

This article, while having historic interest, introduces the reader to a potentially valuable service for supporting research. Researchers are sometimes stymied when they find material in language they are not fluent in. With the expansion of the Internet, many original sources are now available online, including those from foreign countries. Fortunately, organizations like Google have developed and made available free of charge tools that will translate documents from one language to another – an invaluable aid to researchers by providing them access to documents they may otherwise have had to ignore simply because they couldn’t translate them. While these tools are not perfect, particularly with respect to technical terms, they are often more than sufficient for one to gain a clear understanding of the document’s content.

Isis, vol. 81, no. 4, 309, 1990

Choice Reviews Online, 2013

A curriculum for grades 5-8 The History and Physics of Flight curriculum was designed during the summer of 1998 in a one week curriculum development workshop sponsored by the Mn/DOT Office of Aeronautics. Close attention was paid to the Minnesota Graduation Standards during the development of this interdisciplinary curriculum. To e-mail your comments about the curriculum or for more information about aviation education, please visit our website: