Why humankind never stopped envying the bird

For thousands of years humans looked at the sky and envied the most ordinary bird. Man was the king of the earth — but a prisoner of the earth. And the whole history of aviation is the history of one stubborn refusal to accept the word “impossible” as a final answer.

A dream people paid for with their lives

Before the first airplane lifted off the ground, hundreds of people jumped from towers on homemade wings and were killed. They were laughed at, taken for madmen. But it was out of this stubbornness — “a bird can, so I can too” — that what seems mundane today was born: we cross oceans in hours. Flight is a monument to human audacity, to the refusal to believe that the limits of our bodies are the limits of our possibilities.

We rose into the sky not for the sky’s sake

Strangely, having achieved flight, humankind did not calm down — it immediately wanted higher: into the stratosphere, into orbit, to other planets. So it was never about the wings themselves. Behind the pull toward the sky there always stood something larger: the need to widen boundaries, to go where we had not yet been. To the bird the sky is given for free; man fought for it — and perhaps that is why he values it differently. We fly not because we need to, but because we cannot do otherwise.

“The desire to fly is an idea handed down to us by our ancestors who looked with envy on the birds soaring freely through space.”
— Wilbur Wright

My opinion: the history of aviation is the best proof that “impossible,” for a human, most often means “we have not yet figured out how.” Each generation inherits a list of what “cannot be done” — and the best of them cross out half that list. Flight reminds us of what is easy to forget on a hard day: the human is a creature that refused to crawl. And as long as this envy of the bird is alive in us, we have a future.