Just believe it....there's nothing to it

Today I'm celebrating the first flight!

On December 17 in 1903 at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Wilbur and Orville Wright launched the world into the age of aviation. The Wright brothers made the world's first four successful airplane flights on the sands of North Carolina's Outer Banks. Their Flyer lifted off at 10:35 am. The machine weighed 605 pounds and traveled 120 feet in 12 seconds. The fourth and final flight of the day actually had the best results, but that first was the best remembered. Here are links to Orville's description and a detailed account of how they made the first flight too. If you're interested in the view when flying as a pilot, watch this YouTube Climb through the skies to the into the sunrise! video that puts you there for a takeoff and flight into the sunrise.

There's also a lot of great music and videos available about flying. Some of my favorite music includes, Gary Allen's Watching Airplanes, R Kelly's I Believe I Can Fly, and 3 Doors Down's song Landing in London (a version shown below due to its neat starting scene from the cockpit of the airliner).


As posted on YouTube by oceanus0005


The wonders of aviation opens the sky of opportunity for each of us. However, a sister-in-law of mine is afraid to fly. I guess she may feel as Jean Kerr, "I feel about airplanes the way I feel about diets. It seems to me they are wonderful things for other people to go on." If you have aerophobia, aviatophobia or aviophobia, there's lots of help on the Internet, including: Fear of Flying Help, Fear of flying quiz, and some recommendations for your MP3 player to ease the anxiety.

I've flown quite a bit during my life -- with almost a couple hundred thousand frequent flyer miles in my account. I have great memories with flights over the years. including my first flight which was to England and Scotland on a college choir trip, the flight with my Dad as pilot with Mom (which was cut short by her fear), on those many recruiting trips out of College Station in my final year of grad school at Texas A&M on that tiny airplane of Rio Air, on the many New Hope choir tours, on the helicopter tour in the Caribbean, and the many flights around the country for work.

Today, I hope that you remember as the Wilbur brothers demonstrated and as R Kelly sings in I Believe I Can Fly:
If I can see it, then I can do it
If I just believe it, there's nothing to it


Reference: First Flight Society
Image credit: Daniels, John T., photographer. "First Flight," December 17, 1903. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.