Winged Victory
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 10.30.03 | 8:51 PM ET
In just over a month and a half from today, the world will celebrate the 100th anniversary of flight. Hundreds of stories will be written between now and then about the impact of the Wright Brothers’ 12 seconds over Kitty Hawk, and I’m willing to wager that few will be better than Pico Iyer’s essay in the latest issue of Via. Iyer touches on how flight has shaped the world and how it might affect our future. “A hundred years ago, the Wright brothers blew open our imaginations by daring to put their dreams to the test; now, a California businessman like Dennis Tito can pay $20 million to the Russians and find himself spending eight days in space,” he writes. “Flights to Mars, or other places, seem as possible now as flights to the moon—or to Lhasa, in fact—might have seemed a hundred years ago. We have to remake our thinking, our proverbs, and our language to keep up with our expanding and accelerating sense of possibility. In some ways, what the early aviators showed us is that the sky is no longer the limit.”
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
