If you go back to the early days of aviation, the guys designing it built it, and then they got in it and flew it. I mean, who does that anymore?
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
My grandfather was an engineer who invented the automatic pilot for airplanes.
I was hooked on aviation, made model airplanes, and never thought I would be able to fly myself. It cost too much. But then World War II came along and changed all that.
What the history of aviation has brought in the 20th century should inspire us to be inventors and explorers ourselves in the new century.
Growing up, I was fascinated with Buck Rogers' airplanes. As I began to mature in World War II, it became jets and rocket planes. But it was always in the air.
From a very early age, I wanted to fly aeroplanes.
I spent about seven years during the Vietnam War flight-testing airplanes for the Air Force. And then I went in and I had a lot of fun building airplanes that people could build in their garages. And some 3,000 of those are flying. Of course, one of them is around-the-world Voyager.
When I started flying, I realized how enjoyable it was, and flying became my main focus while engineering went on the back burner.
I learned to fly an airplane, and had my own airplane during the 1960s.
Flying, for some reason, has never been my favorite thing, but after taking some aviation classes and reading about it and learning about it... They've been doing this for over a hundred years, they've been to the moon and back; they kind of have a good system going here.
Airplanes were invented by natural selection. Now you can say that intelligent design designs our airplanes of today, but there was no intelligent design really designing those early airplanes. There were probably at least 30,000 different things tried, and when they crash and kill the pilot, don't try that again.