Imagine that you’re a person who is obsessed with airplanes. Naturally
you’re excited when everyone starts talking about this big new book,
*Aviation in the 21st Century.* You get your copy and start
reading. Just as you’d hoped, there’s a detailed discussion of the
flight characteristics of a vast variety of plane types and a
comprehensive record of different countries’ commercial fleets, from the
beginning of aviation until today, plus a few artfully chosen
illustrations of classic early planes. But long stretches of the book
are quite different. They are devoted to the general principle that, in
an atmosphere, heavier objects fall faster than light ones, building up
to the universal law that lighter-than-air objects will float. Finally,
in the conclusion, you find some bleak reflections on the environmental
consequences of air travel – hardly mentioned til now – and a plea for
the invention of some new technology that will allow fast air travel
without the use of fossil fuels. How do you feel, when you set the book
down? You would be grateful for the factual material – even if the good
stuff is mostly relegated to the online appendices. You would be
impressed by the rigorous logic with which the principle of buoyancy was
developed, and admire the author’s iconoclastic willingness to break
with the orthodox view that all motion takes place in a vacuum. You
probably share the author’s hopes for some way of eliminating the carbon
emissions from air travel. But you might also find yourself with the
uneasy feeling that the whole is somehow less than the sum of its parts. [click to continue…]
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