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A SALUTE TO AVIATION

Sixty-five years ago this month, two brothers by the name of Wright-mechanics from a Dayton, Ohio, bicycle shop-lifted their fragile Wright Flyer from the sand dunes of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Their efforts, following years of heavier-than-air experimentation, became history's first sustained powered flight. At the time the event did little to silence the scoffers who were sure that if man were supposed to fly he would have been created with wings.

[[image – drawing of the Wright Brother's first airplane inflight]]

Yet today, so few years later, the economy and progress of most every nation in the world is dependent upon the airplane. From a barely airworthy vehicle of bamboo and baling wire, the airplane has developed to a high-speed, sophisticated machine capable of carrying hundreds of passengers and tons of cargo between continents and across oceans. Airlines of the world stretch their far-flung routes in an ever-tightening network across the globe, reducing oceans to rivers, and making close neighbors of once distinct nations.

Not content to restrict his travel to his earthly environs, man in the latter half of the twentieth century is also reaching out to explore the stars and discover neighboring planets in a space program which only science fiction readers could envision a few decades ago.

Man's great triumphs in the sky are merely prologue for the great developments to come as he continues to shatter barriers of knowledge in outer space and the world around him.

[[image - small drawing of a propeller]]