Aping The Aircraft
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As a relative newbie to the aerospace sector I have only been to three Farnborough Airshows, but have been fortunate enough to have seen the last remaining flight-capable Avro Vulcan, Vulcan XH558, fly at each of them. Each time it has, it has been a very big deal, for the old bird was enabled to fly only with the extensive charitable work of the Vulcan to The Sky Trust, which in 2007 replenished Vulcan XH558 with a finite amount of flight hours so that it could take to the skies for a few more years and delight crowds all over the world. In 2013, after one final flourish of airshows and pageants, those finite flight hours will have been consumed, and so Vulcan will be consigned to the ground forever.
Something strange happened when Vulcan took to the skis for these displays; it does something that not many other technologies can do. Itmoves people. People clap, cheer and gasp, some are even teary-eyed and well up with sentiment. This isn’t confined to Vulcan – other aircraft exude similar feelings: Typhoon, the Lancaster Bomber, the B-52, Messerschmitts, MiGs, and even civil aircraft such as the A380, Dreamliner (which was the first Boeing aircraft to perform a flying display in the UK for 28 years at Farnborough) and of course Concorde, are capable of inducing feelings of wonderment and delight among spectators. Vulcan arguably seems to be the most evocative, perhaps due to the magnificent restoration job done by the Trust after being told it would never fly again, but more likely because of its prominent role in shaping military history, its generational span and, of course, the thunderous, apocalyptic growl that emanates from its engines upon take off and fly-by.
On the face of it it’s rather odd that a bunch of rivets, steel, aluminium and, more recently, carbon fibre, can be so evocative. Some other technologies come close to doing the same: cars certainly evoke feelings of cool, class, fun and enjoyment, but they are built to do so; automotive designers are frequently given licence to regard form as the equal of function. Great and beautiful feats of architecture such as cathedrals and other religious edifices can invoke strong feelings, but are built with magnificence in mind; they were created to pay fealty. Certain mobile phone and computing corporations are able to whip their fanbase into a frenzy by releasing an update to an operating system, but that will be rendered obsolete in a few months; hardly the bigger picture. Aerospace seems to be unique inasmuch as its products and platforms are built for purpose, for the long haul, and necessarily follow the mantra that form follows function, which renders them efficient, sometimes even austere, yet they are able to move the people that watch them do what they were designed to do.
Aerospace is odd among high-tech industries in that it is highly conscious of its rich heritage and yet remains at the absolute cutting-edge of new research. It manages to look both back and forward simultaneously, and people find themselves growing old alongside aircraft; they are at once a link to our own past, and a glimpse of the future. This is because of the extremely long incubation periods it takes to research, develop, manufacture, assemble, fly, maintain and eventually retire an aircraft and its various components.
The Instant Gratification to be Had from High-Tech.
There was a school of thought when I was studying for my literature masters that certain common technologies with which we interact are all prostheses of some type or another. Television (derived from the Greek ‘tele’ and Latin ‘visio’) is an extension to the eye, as is a camera, while a phone is effectively a prosthetic ear. The advent and prevalence of personal high-tech industries has managed to combine these hitherto different smartphone or tablet devices into small, portable devices that combine telecommunications, television, radio, music collections, books, telephones, camera technologies and more. The technology itself is admirable and astonishing, doubly so for the rate at which it has developed; but when something offers so many different prostheses in one handy unit, it doesn’t take much of a leap for one to consider them to be a prosthetic, or an extension, of the entire self.
In my book “Eat Yourself, Clarice!” I talk about the desperate need for the people in a westernised world with no secrets – that is, a post-Cold War world – to externalise their deepest thoughts. They want to be seen, they want to be analysed, they want their every thought to be validated and responded to by the wider world; and if the price to pay for that attention is privacy, then so be it. The advent of technologies that enable such unregulated and uncensored sprees of self-expression have compounded this approach because of the instantaneousness that they offer, to the point where a great many people develop strange behaviours and feelings toward them, such as ‘phantom limb’ phenomenon, while 66% of people claim to suffer from good old-fashioned nomophobia. This is because of the instantaneousness of what they offer, and this has developed at pace. The evolution from landline telephone and computer, through to mobile telephone and internet communications, through to better equipped mobiles and computer-based social media sites, and finally to smartphones that combine all of the above, has been remarkably swift. No doubt the next step in this fast-forward evolution, perhaps in the area of the Internet of Things, will be upon us very soon. Instant technology, and its offshoots, such as instant entertainment (instant TV, music, books and the like) is sold to us as being convenient, but it doesn’t take very long for ubiquitous convenience to condition people into wanting everything now, expecting it, and bally well getting it, too.
The instantaneousness that currently characterises western society begins to invade its future, for when a society becomes perpetually distracted by the temptations of the present, it is less likely to place investments in the future. The rise of self-externalising technologies is not the cause of this, but it is a symptom, and it is happening. Stagnating birth rates sweep across western Europe and indicate a fixation with ‘nowness’ at the expense of the future. As of January 1st 2012, Germany ranks as 217th out of 222 in terms of global birth rates (a birth rate of 8.3 births per 1000 people); Italy, home of the church, ranks 207th, while Bosnia & Herzegovina, Czech Republic, Austria, Japan, South Korea, Greece, Switzerland and many other rich, western(ised) nations are all jostling for position around the bottom of the barrel. We may externalise our thoughts and perpetuate our thoughts and our enjoyment of the present moment through the permanent accessibility of communications channels to the point where even the simple anticipatory pleasure of looking forward to doing so becomes redundant. But the things which externalised and perpetuated the self had a different name not so long ago: children.
Ape The Aircraft
Meanwhile, the next generation of aerospace products and platforms may not be with us for another 15 years, and they can expect to enter into a service life of perhaps another 30 years on top of that. The ones that are entering into service now, such as Dreamliner, are not in fact new; the technologies on the aircraft were being researched twenty years ago, and if we take the Boeing 747, in its fifth decade of service, as a yardstick, Dreamliner can be expected to deliver a full service for many decades to come.
The gestation of aerospace technology is necessarily slow; it must be done correctly and comply with aviation regulations; this slow accumulation of knowledge and technology spans generations and projects far into the future. That is why historically there have only been relatively few nations with world-class aerospace expertise and experience, and why an investment in aerospace is, to a large extent, a confident bet that future generations will be around to use and improve on that technology. The scientists and engineers researching and developing emerging aerospace technologies must know that there is chance that they will no longer be working when the products they enable finally take to the skies; and that there is a very real chance that the aircraft or products themselves may well outlive them once in service.
It might seem facetious to say so, but the long-term thinking of the aerospace industry is a surviving behaviour of what Tom Wolfe referred to as “the biological stream” of humanity, in which we all take part, whether conscious of it or not, inheriting the baton of the past, running with it and eventually passing it on the future generations. When birth rates decline to the point where it is reasonable to deduce that a society has lost the desire, or the instinct, to pass the baton on, it would seem that investment in future aerospace programmes and or products is at best anachronistic, at worst hopelessly optimistic. It was a year ago that I wrote that industries which look to be in rude health can very suddenly grind to a halt; we had a first-hand perspective of a very prominent precedent for this happening. I hope that is not the case, and that long-term investment means the continuation of the flow of the stream.
Many people marvel at aircraft because they reflect the exploratory endeavours, the pioneering spirit, of mankind itself. But now we come to a point where we require mankind to ape the aircraft; we need to subscribe to a long-term view that will bring benefits and opportunities to future generations that are beyond our line of sight. And if people gather at an airshow eighty years from now to watch one of the last remaining A380 or Dreamliners, patched together by a charitable trust, take to the sky, it will have worked. We won’t be there to see it, but we can lay the foundations to make it happen.
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This article first appeared on _Connect, September 2012