Viewing page 3 of 102

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

-3-

I am neither omniscient nor am I parading such scraps of information as I may possess. I leave it to ordained sources to speak of aeronautics as if they knew the subject quite well instead of having only barely made its acquaintance.

The most important thought I have yet mastered professionally is that it is difficult to learn the truth about anything. The more I have studied the innumerable aspects of any worthy subject, great or small, the more qualified and the less arbitrary my opinions have become. Twenty centuries ago, sincere students discovered that there was no exact truth, save in mathematics, greatest of all sciences. The research or recent years has cast doubt on the supposed exactness and immutability of even that subject.

My contacts of the past two decades have taught me the painful truth that many of the so-called aeronautical authorities, bubbling over with the effervescence of inexperience, who voice positive opinions, intended to dominate an audience or to furnish quantitative publicity, understand actually little or nothing of the future scope of air navigation. It was such an influence, possessed as it was of lighthearted undiscernment and interesting only for its inconsistencies, that retired America's progress in the air during the past eighteen years. Freed now from this persuasion, I believe American civil and military aeronautics will at last progress along a sounder and more consistent course.

However, enough of this prologue lest you consider me but another occupational optimist.

Proceeding with the chronicle, may I be permitted to observe that the future of commercial air transportation, in which it is estimated that already private American capital to the extent of perhaps $125,000,000 has

Transcription Notes:
probably intended to say "research of recent years"