Article#326 - Skyprints

Ever since Wilbur and Orville Wright launch the first flight ever near Kitty Hawk at late 1903, aviation world has grown to be one of the integral parts of modern society. Millions of people travel across countries everyday, each of them indulge themselves in each of their own business. And in accomplishing that, they spent some hours of their lives sitting on a seat among hundreds, which collectively travel above the abode of clouds.
It has been more than a hundred years of aviation history, there are only tiny fraction of people who keep themselves feel amazed to the sense of flying. Most of the other guy might have forgotten the dreams of their ancestors, who looked in jealousy upon the free, roaming birds and insects. And then they take the flight for granted: to take off, to fall asleep, to land on each of their own destination. And to immediately catch up on their phones once they acquire their touchdown on the land once more.

For that tiny fraction of people, travelling in the thin air is indeed a product of wonder. Some of people might not be able to stand the lingering sense of insecure, being thousands of meters above the ground with nothing to hold onto - especially when the parts of the plane itself are not reliable anymore. Others might feel a bit disturbed with turbulence coming once in a while. But not few hath spoken about the tingling sense of wonder when they realized; they are actually flying within the clouds, among the birds, drawing themselves ever nearer to the dazzling sunshine.

The flying sense one experienced from a flight might be regarded as one of the greatest freedom of the Modern Age, as human beings are now able to set their feet free. Free to release the bond that ties our puny figures to the earth, to lean your back off and wander through the thin air.

Science, freedom, beauty, adventure: what more could you ask of life? Aviation combined all the elements I loved. There was science in each curve of an airfoil, in each angle between strut and wire, in the gap of a spark plug or the color of the exhaust flame. There was freedom in the unlimited horizon, on the open fields where one landed. A pilot was surrounded by beauty of earth and sky. He brushed treetops with the birds, leapt valleys and rivers, explored the cloud canyons he had gazed at as a child. Adventure lay in each puff of wind.

I began to feel that I lived on a higher plane than the skeptics of the ground; one that was richer because of its very association with the element of danger they dreaded, because it was freer of the earth to which they were bound. In flying, I tasted a wine of the gods of which they could know nothing. Who valued life more highly, the aviators who spent it on the art they loved, or these misers who doled it out like pennies through their antlike days? I decided that if I could fly for ten years before I was killed in a crash, it would be a worthwhile trade for an ordinary life time.

— Charles A. Lindbergh, The Spirit of St. Louis

These tiny fraction of people are always aware that they put their life at stake when deciding to take a flight. Not to mention that their lives are actually always at stake — a thought that rarely crosses the mind of the likes who take things for granted.
But why worry? After all, the air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and delicious, as Mark Twain narrated. And why shouldn't it be? —it is the same the angels breathe. The same angels as yours and mine. The same angels residing within our disclosed territories.

Henceforth, those puny humans set their foot again on the lovely earth. The sky looks down upon the bright-looking minds, while sunshine pours its might to the glaring sights.
And I haven't been more relieved than ever, this time.

photo credit 1
photo credit 2