Accessibility of the Air

[This is undoubtably an overly-pessimistic view, and I fully believe that within our lifetimes, air and space will continue to become more and more accessible.]

As an undergraduate student, the idea of flying solitarily or only with a few others seems like a total luxury, something imagined through the rosy glasses of such films as Out of Africa or The English Patient, where solo flights are dangerous, but incredibly romantic -- where they provide an elite escape for colonialists, but not for those sans power. Additionally, and perhaps because our class readings have been primarily focused on the flight of the past, I felt that now not only through fiction, but through historical fact, my historical distance from such events was secured.

A ridiculous scene.

Also this. 

Today, solo flight remains highly elite. While commercial flight can also be seen this way, there is something undeniably individualistic about controlling one’s own path, burning one’s own fuel, etc. This experience of singular machine and singular human immersed in the natural world is incredibly intimate and personal, and provides an intriguing argument for the necessity of machine in our human exploration of the world. But despite Werntz’ assertions, I was reminded that flying was not something everyone can participate in.

Listening to the lecture, I couldn’t help but continue to see non-commercial flight as an impossibility for myself or my loved ones. To me, flight may take humanity beyond our natural limits, but it still relies on our constructed, or artificial ones. The form of escape flight provides cannot escape us from health or financial binds. Born in an era where humanity had already set foot on the moon, where commercial flight has become commonplace in developed countries, I have always seen the UP of air and space as achievable. It is these other limits that are more difficult to push ourselves UP out of. 

From the ground on Tuesday, I felt as if listening to a bird tell stories  -- a great metal bird with a head and heart of human flesh and blood -- a creature that could take off into an open space yet beyond my limitations.