When I first went into the Air Force, I needed to to go for a physical at McGuire AFB because it was the nearest base to my school. I was sitting in the lounge waiting for my appointment when a nurse escorting in this rather elderly gentleman. She helped him sit down and said, “Colonel, l’ll be with you shortly”. He nodded and then turns to me and says, “so I take it you’re signing up”. I said “yes sir”. Then he started in with “I remember when I signed up. My buddy and I wanted to go off and fight in the big one. (which was world war one for him). We weren’t old enough so we both wrote 18 on the bottoms of our shoes so that we could honestly say that we were over 18 when we signed up”.
The Story
He proceeded to tell me how he wanted to be in the cavalry. And after a couple of months in the military, it was pretty clear that he wasn’t going to be seeing any horses. Then one day and an officer came and said, “I’m looking for a couple of strapping young men who want to try something a little different”. And he said, “I was bored and my buddy was bored. So we both raised our hands and they put us in a vehicle and they took us out to a different base and they introduced us to two crazy brothers named Orville and Wilbur”. And for the next half hour or so, I got story after story about how this guy had flown every plane that the military ever made, uh, from world war I through the Korean war .
He also threw in how he’d been to every continent or every country except Turkey and Antarctica. Now some of the chronology is a little off because Wilbur Wright died before WW I started so I don’t know how much of the story was true. The reality is that the Army couldn’t get people to fly the early planes because they tended to nose dive and crash. There were 11 deaths from the initial batch of Wright aircraft. You needed people that could screw the fear – or simply didn’t know any better. It still made for a good story.
It’s hard to imagine not having been on an airplane, but 100 years ago the opposite was true. And a few years before that the number was zero. There were a lot of experts in 1900 that believed that powered flight was impossible and that anyone who tried would die. There were more than a few that proved that opinion true. So what were two brothers who never finished high school thinking when they decided to do the impossible?
The Wright Brothers
The Wright brothers are actually fairly representative of people making leaps in technology or science in general. They weren’t bound by the scientific boundaries so they didn’t mind breaking them. They built their own wind tunnel and spent around $1000 to build the first powered airplane. Orville became the first brother airborne after a coin toss. Surprisingly, they only flew together once during their lifetime. If Wilbur hadn’t died prior to WW I, the Wright brothers may have gone on to be titans of aviation. Orville didn’t have a love for the business and quickly sold it after Wilbur’s death. He was still involved in aviation for many years to come, serving primarily on various boards.
They did have an unwavering belief in what they were doing and this is probably what allowed them to overcome their fears. Even after Orville was involved in the first aircraft fatality, he continued to fly. It’s part of the process. If you are going to be first at something, you just have to screw the fear and do it.