The Next Fifty Years of Flight
as visualized by Bernt Balchen and told to Erik Bergaust
The first temptation, with futurologists of the past, is to mock their predictions that didn't come true. The Hudson Terraplane never gave way to that rocket automobile, chuckle. The population collapse of the 1970s, heh heh, is as dead an issue as the transatlantic railroad tunnel. An IBM chairman in the 50s said five computers should about suffice for the United States, five!
The second and worse temptation is to point with awe to predictions that did pan out. Leonardo was right, you can fly with a horizontal rotor! Satellites do carry huge volumes of electronic communications between continents! Dedicated scientists really have eradicated dread diseases like smallpox!
A more useful take on futurology is to look at what you might call the "texture" of predictions, the process of thinking about what you can see at a moment in time and where this or that line of development may lead in conjunction with others. The single prediction is good for a headline or a laugh, depending, but what's interesting is to watch an expert extrapolate a present system of knowledge and achievement into a future system. The "spot" prediction is next to worthless; Leonardo couldn't make a helicopter, he could only dream one, and his speculation did not become part of technological history, merely a curiosity found in an old notebook.
My father didn't throw things away. One of his bookshelves yielded this treasure: a futurological work that came to light just about the time its "next fifty years" ran out. Bernt Balchen, a Norwegian-American expert on aircraft and missiles, gave a series of interviews to journalist Erik Bergaust in the early 1950s, and this book appeared in 1954, marking the 50th anniversary of the Wright Brothers' first flight. We can watch an aviation professional looking at a half-century of progress and imagining what might come next--not dreaming about it but using hard data and experience to project another half-century into the future. Which now is nothing more than the recent past. It makes an odd but fascinating read.
"Norwegian-American expert" scarcely does justice to Balchen (1899-1973). He began as a naval aviator, joined the R.A.F. when Germany occupied his country, and later transferred to the U.S. Army Air Forces. Involved with such explorers as Amundsen, Ellsworth and Byrd, he was the first person to pilot aircraft over both North and South Poles, and he helped establish civil aviation in Norway as well as U.S. Arctic military aviation. By the time of these interviews he had logged 28 years as flyer, commander and manager. When a person presents this kind of résumé, you want to know what he thinks.
Seeing a complex picture of flight after its first 50 years, Balchen foresaw a complex picture after another 50. Passenger lines were getting well on their feet in 1953 and beginning, hesitantly, to adopt jet propulsion. The major air forces were flying the second generation of combat jets and, indeed, had just been flying them against one another in Korea. Chuck Yeager had logged a number of spectacular hours in high-altitude rocket craft like the X-1. Power plant research and development was a hot field, with afterburners becoming common on military planes and some early turboprop engines already in service. The postwar can-do environment included lots of little companies, and big ones too, pressing forward to get new inventions into the market. Everything was in a stir, and a futurologist had lots of trends to follow.
The best way to convey the breadth of these predictions may be simply to quote the chapter titles from The Next Fifty Years of Flight:
- Your Son May Own a Jet Plane!
- A Helicopter in Your Backyard
- The Convertiplanes Are Coming
- Comeback for the Seaplanes?
- The Airplane Conquers the Arctic
- Boarding the Jetliner
- The Superjets of Tomorrow
- Europe in Two Hours--in a Glass Plane
- Electronic Brains Take Over
- Boosting by Rockets
- Good-by to the Pilot?
- Reaching for the Stars
A little breathless, sort of Gee-Whiz, yes. But you begin to see what I mean by "texture." You will find in this book an airliner cruising at 8000 miles an hour, but it won't be just a "what if"; it will be tied to many other lines of development in science and engineering. It will be plausible, in some sense. If it's a wrong prediction, it's wrong for some revealing reason, not because it was simply made up.
Take that "glass plane" for example. It turns out Balchen wasn't talking about Pyrex; he related his view to current work on phenolic resin materials reinforced with glass fibers. Composites, in other words. What we increasingly make airplanes from today, even if our designers think in terms of polycarbonate resins and carbon nanotube reinforcement. The prediction was not right, but you can't say it was wrong either; a smart observer could see the direction, just not the fine detail.
It's true that fifty more years did not bring about the 8000-mph passenger liner, the helicopter in every garage, the commuter jet that lands vertically atop a skyscraper--equally true that those fifty years did see developments Balchen failed to project, such as mass air travel, GPS navigation, concerns about stratospheric ozone depletion. But this is what happens to every futurologist: Systems respond to small perturbations, and no matter how well you understand the present makeup of the system, the next two weeks can always upset your picture. You mustn't read predictive works to find out what's coming; you are already traveling into the future at one second per second, which is darn fast, and you'll see what happens then better than you can now. You read futurology to learn about the systems of your world and to practice how to reason from premises to conclusions. Here's a pretty good example of that, a work whose conclusions have been tested and still have some power even though many of them don't describe our present world.
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The Next Fifty Years of Flight