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No man flies high enough to peer into tomorrow nor swift enough to overtake the future! No man flies straight enough to orient the eventual destination of aviation in human affairs! However, since we have projected our shadow across unknown horizons we must be interested in where it falls.

It is not enough to prepare air power for the world, we must prepare the world for air power.

To do this requires no less skill than to engineer the aircraft itself. It took imagination to produce aviation! It will take imagination to adapt aviation! We have reached the place in the creation of this new social force where we must pause and define our work. Its scope! Its adaptability! Its limitation!

There was a time when we could classify people as "inside" or "outside" of aviation. That time is past! The industry of production and the art of flight may belong to a few of us, but aviation belongs to all humanity. There is no man, woman or child on earth today who is not vicariously in the skies. The mountains are leveled in relation to all; the earth is shrunk for all; the maps are re-made for all. Isolation is becoming a myth! The grip of time and space has been loosened on human destiny! Aviation is the expansion of all three dimensions of life! We must define the influences of that expansion upon every phase of civilization before we can proceed much further. The lay world is now uncertain whether aviation is a great liberalizing and constructive force or whether it is an agency of violence, and a step too complicated for universal use.