Lessons From the History of Flight’ 
By Grover LOENING 
Member, Advisory Board 
National Air Museum 
Smithsonian Institution 
[With 7 plates] 
To DERIVE LEssons from the history of flight, we must go much 
further than merely to list historical achievements. We must delve 
into a questionable hindsight area to find our mistaken trends—plunge 
into the jungle of misfits, false starts, and abandoned hopes—picking 
out on the way the waifs that we have lost and let them give us guid- 
ance more clearly to see the mistakes and omissions that we are, 
somewhat unthinkingly, engaged in today. 
At the outset of this study, let us limit ourselves to aircraft and 
their flying and to related aeronautics, and not get involved too much 
in the newer area of missiles and space. The latter fields have more 
strictly to do with artillery and astronautics, except for the brief 
time of takeoff and landing, and little to do with the air ocean as we 
know it. Space-missile astronautics has to do more precisely with 
ballistics in non-air-breathing media. 
The aircraft industry itself is almost unconsciously growing into 
an arsenal and artillery industry, and we can well pause and question 
whether the romance of the brilliant and exciting things that are 
being done in the space field are about to dull our realization that 
heavier-than-air aviation still is, and will be for a long time, a great 
field of human endeavor, of transportation business, and of military 
logistics activity on a huge scale. 
The growth of the U.S. air-transport industry from nothing in 
1920 to 24 billion passenger-miles in 1958 is merely a beginning. We 
will shortly progress into supersonic flying all over the world. 
Europe-in-an-hour, round-the-world-in-8-hours, are on the drafting 
board. Ina few short years both fields, aircraft and space, will, how- 
ever, outgrow the present flurry of incorporating them into one pack- 
1The Lester D. Gardner Lecture, given originally at the Massachusetts Institute of 
Technology, and given also at the Smithsonian Institution on May 18, 1959. 
347 
