In 1914, Hammondsport native and aviation pioneer, Glenn Curtiss, announced that he would build an airplane intended to be the first to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Considering that the first successful motorized air flight was just eleven years earlier in 1903, it was an extraordinarily bold goal.
I've always felt a little sorry for Alcock and Brown. Partially because their achievement tends to be overshadowed by Lindberg's solo flight eight years later, partially because life was not kind to them. Alcock was killed in an air crash six months after they crossed the Atlantic, Brown's only son died during the Second World War - his Mosquito crashed in the Netherlands - and Brown himself passed away only a few years later.
It took them sixteen hours and they almost died; nowadays it takes sixteen hours to travel from London to Perth and the risk is vastly, vastly lower. Fabric planes and iron men.
Regarding aviation in general I'm naturally stoic but the state of the world depresses me. Last October I went on holiday to Hong Kong, which involved a twelve-hour flight from Heathrow. My dad was stationed in Hong Kong by the Royal Navy back in the late 1960s and I've always wanted to see it with my own eyes, viz:
The flight was £450! My mind still hasn't adjusted to the fact that a flight half-way across the world in a giant airliner (an A380 in this case; BA also flies 777's on the same route, sadly not the 747 any more) only costs £450. Truly we live in an age of plenty.
It worries me that when flights resume they will be much more expensive, permanently so; it's melancholic because the environment consequences of ultra-cheap long-haul air travel are probably terrible, and so a reduction in passenger numbers is good for the planet, but fewer passengers probably means higher ticket prices. I don't want to go back to the 1980s, when the average British person could afford one package holiday in Spain once a year, and the likes of New York or Hong Kong were something you either went without, or something you saved up for years.