These tragedies were part of a long and fraught process that helped make flying as safe as it is today. Aeroplanes suffered a catalogue of catastrophic construction and engineering failures compounded by bad weather and pilot error. Sacrifices were made in great numbers in the early days of powered flight. Even when a part of the science of flight had been understood, men like Otto Lilienthal, a 19th Century German pioneer who experimented with gliders, were doomed, their contraptions too heavy and too unresponsive to allow their brave pilots to chase birds or even to get much above ground.
Soon enough, this figure will rise to a million: a million passengers, flown safely, if not always comfortably, across countries and continents, and with little call for comment.īefore engines could lift heavier-than-air machines convincingly off the ground, any attempt at flight had been dangerous, and yet for hundreds of years, adventurers strapped wings to their arms, and leapt off hilltops and towers in the vain hope of flying. At any one time hundreds of thousands of us are cocooned in pressurised cabins scything through the cold upper reaches of the troposphere.
