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786Il est probable que, dans d’autres circonstances, sans la situation de crise que l’on connaît aujourd’hui (Irak, guerre contre la terreur, etc), le centenaire du premier vol des frères Wright aurait connu une célébration plus éclatante aux USA. Pour autant, beaucoup de choses ont été écrites à ce propos, la plupart convenues et conventionnelles.
L’hebdomadaire Defense News a publié une série d’articles pour commémorer cet anniversaire. Nous publions le dernier de la série, dans le numéro du 22 décembre 2003. Il est écrit par Richard Hallion, présenté comme « an aviation historian who works for the U.S. Department of Defense. The views and opinions presented here are his own. » L’article est intéressant à plus d’un titre.
• D’une façon générale, c’est un document parce qu’il présente une critique américaine assez vive de la vision déformée qu’ont les Américains de l’histoire de l’aviation, sans pour autant remettre en cause les fondements de cette déformation américaine de l’histoire de l’aviation. Pour Hallion, c’est l’évidence, l’Amérique est The Aerospace Nation depuis l’origine (le vol des frères Wright) mais elle a mal assumé ce rôle, dans tous les cas des origines jusqu’aux années 1930. Hallion ne tire pas les conclusions de l’accumulation de remarques sur l’absence US (au contraire de l’Europe) dans les investissements, la créativité, etc (ou le fait que ses rares pionniers, les frères Wright et Glenn Curtiss, étaient obligés d’aller en France pour poursuivre leurs expérimentations dès 1907-1908). Pourquoi ne pas faire simple quand la complication (et le mythe) n’explique rien ? On dira alors que l’événement historique montre que, jusqu’en 1914 sans aucun doute (le reste de la période, à partir de 1918 jusqu’aux années 1930 correspondant à une décadence de cet état) la France était The Aerospace Nation, par l’esprit, l’élan, l’ardeur, la caractéristique sociale et éthique du phénomène, autant que par ses activités industrielles et technologiques dans ce domaine. (Évidemment, on comprend que, par les temps qui courent des relations franco-américaines, le fait soit irritant pour un Américain pur sucre.)
• ... La critique de Hallion et la complication du cas américain sont présentes dès le titre qui apparaît assez insolent, d’un point de vue américaniste, par la présence d’un point d’interrogation en général peu admissible dans ces circonstances : « An Aerospace Nation ? » Il ne fait aucun doute, pour tout Américain bien-pensant, que non seulement l’Amérique est une “nation aérospatiale”, mais qu’elle est la seule à pouvoir se prévaloir de ce titre.
• Remarquable dans ce contexte, la constance de la critique même pour les années de triomphe de l’aviation américaine. Étrange esprit que Hallion : acceptant le mythe américaniste mais critiquant ses modalités d’application d’une façon constante.
• Le passage le plus intéressant est la fin de l’analyse, où Hallion fait une critique dévastatrice de la situation actuelle, la décrivant comme pas loin d’être catastrophique pour l’aviation américaine. Quel contraste avec nos analyses délirantes de fascination et d’obséquiosité sur la puissance américaine, le “technological gap” et autres sornettes des analystes bien-pensants européens, incapables de distinguer quelque réalité que ce soit en dehors des consignes de la propagande. Sur ce point, bien garder à l’esprit ces deux paragraphes de Hallion :
« Today, America faces a profoundly uncertain future. Areas once taken for granted as the province of American excellence no longer remain so, or are up for grabs: global air transport, regional air transport, general aviation, even military aircraft development.
» The United States is plagued with aging fleets of military aircraft, while potential threats (aircraft and missile systems) proliferate in sophistication and numbers. Declining research investment, and declining student enrolment in air and space studies (down almost 60 percent over the last decade), threaten further degradation of the U.S. national aerospace base. »
[Nota Bene : un long commentaire de ce texte paraît dans le n°09 du Volume 19 de de defensa, du 25 janvier 2004, rubrique Analyse, sous le titre : « Le mythe volant ».]
By Richard Hallion, Defense News, December 22, 2003
Happy centenary of flight. Or, more precisely, happy centenary of powered, sustained and controlled winged flight, for that is what the Wright brothers actually achieved on Dec. 17, 1903, in one 12-second aerial jaunt above the wind-swept dunes of North Carolina's Outer Banks.
With that accomplishment, they set the stage for the global revolution in aviation that has led to the world we all share today, a world in which power, presence and commerce is increasingly controlled, undertaken or supported by the flight of aircraft and orbiting spacecraft. Truly, as Microsoft's Bill Gates stated several years ago, “Their invention effectively became the World Wide Web of that era, bringing people, languages, ideas and values together.”
It is axiomatic that the flight revolution has been one the United States pursued with inexorable zeal and dedication; the names of American aerospace companies are noble ones, enshrined in pantheons of aeronautical achievement such as the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum.
Highlights during the last century indicate just how important America's air contribution has been: the DC-3 of 1935 that ushered in the era of mass-market global air transport; the almost-300,000 airplanes produced by America's wartime industry for the allied cause; the Boeing 707 that ushered in the era of trans-Atlantic air travel so extensive that today's travelling business person has difficulty finding space to stow a briefcase, what with all the backpacks of students journeying overseas; and the investment in space that brought us face to face with the beauty and wonder of the cosmos and the staggering isolation and fragility of our own planet.
But these are matched by the global contributions of the world aeronautical community:
• Louis Blériot's Channel-crossing monoplane of 1909, the aviation industry's first international export success;
• The genius of Louis Bechereau, designer of the first streamlined airplane, the breathtaking Deperdussin Monocoque of 1912;
• Igor Sikorsky's brilliant multiengine transports and bombers, conceived in the turmoil of late-Czarist Russia and proof of the design mastery he would reveal in their later seaplanes and helicopters;
• The angular menace of the Nazis' Stuka dive bomber and the deadly beauty of Reginald Mitchell's Battle-of-Britain winning Spitfire;
• The rugged efficiency of Ilyushin's tank-busting Shturmovik;
• The postwar elegance of Marcel Dassault's family of Mirage fighters and business jets;
• The market-winning excellence of the Airbus family of jetliners;
• The increasing number (in the postCold War era) of foreign nations joining a space club once limited to just American and Russian players.
And therein lies a lesson: Flight has been a global achievement, not just an American one. Certainly, the Wrights, when they invented the airplane, did not do so in isolation from the world aeronautical community. They were generous in acknowledging their debts to those international pioneers who had gone before, such as England's Sir George Cayley, Germany's Otto Lilienthal and France's Louis Mouillard, even if popular history largely has ignored their honesty in favour of a mythic fable picturing them as two untutored tinkerers who turned, with hardly a pause, from making bicycles to making airplanes, with no external influence.
In this centenary year, Americans need to keep in mind some uncomfortable truths front the first century of flight that, taken with the present state of U.S. air and space, question whether it can remain, as the United States proudly calls itself, an aerospace nation.
First, the Wrights themselves were profoundly overconfident, so much so that in 1906, Wilbur Wright stated that “no one will be able to develop a practical flyer within five years ... [in fact] it is many times five years.” It fact it wasn't. In 1911, Italy would dispatch an air expeditionary force to Libya.
They also were overly conservative, showing little inclination to proceed beyond the unstable canard configuration they had first demonstrated at Kitty Hawk, or to fly faster. In 1911, Wilbur and Orville wrote dismissively of high speed. Orville noted to a fellow aviator, “we do not care to fly over 100 miles an hour ourselves, or put our men on such a job.”
But others did. The next year, the French would win the Gordon Bennett race on American soil and set a record with a streamlined Deperdussin racer flying at 108 mph, without any American opposition; the fastest Wright “Speed Scout” flying at that time had a speed of just 67 mph.
In short, in less than a decade, the United States completely lost its aeronautical competitiveness with Europe, so that in World War I, American combat pilots went to war in French, British and Italian airplanes. As for the Wrights, they desperately sought to protect their increasingly obsolescent technology by a series of enervating patent suite that further devastated and distracted American industry, and which achieved little. In 1918, Wright machines constituted less than 1 percent of American military airplanes.
Resorting to-court restraint rather than to the rigor of the marketplace is perhaps understandable. Years later, at the height of the Depression, Orville predicted the United States would turn socialist, noting, “I do hope I'm still here to see how it works.”
It would take two decades before the United States regained its competitiveness in aeronautics. In great measure, it did so thanks to European émigrés such as Max Munk, Theodore von Karman and Igor Sikorsky fleeing unstable political or economic circumstances.
There also was the importation of European research and educational traditions, typified by the creation of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (the predecessor of today's NASA) and the monumental importance of the Guggenheim grants to universities, establishing and strengthening programs in aeronautical engineering and aviation studies at schools across the United States.
Even with this, Americans continued to ignore the significance of new developments that would profoundly alter the future of aviation: radar, the swept wing, the jet engine, atomic weapon research (until urgently brought to U. S. attention by yet another émigré scientist, Albert Einstein, and then pursued by a community of largely European-rooted scientist displaced from their own homelands).
The immediate post-World War II era must be seen as America's golden age in aviation, for once again the European nations were unable to effectively compete with the United States in aeronautics, which did what it always did best: adapt, innovate, exploit and produce.
Even so, the United States missed the significance of jet transports until the British Comet brought their potential home to America's airline system. Only a disastrous series of tragic Comet accidents enabled the United States to retain its global air transport lead until the era of the 707 and DC-8 began in 1957-58.
Sputnik shocked U.S. complacency, highlighting yet another opportunity lost. Yuri Gagarin's first manned orbital flight reinforced the message. In defense, the United States brilliantly pursued transonic and supersonic research programs, but then faced serious gaps between growing technological capabilities and the realities of military needs.
Not surprisingly, Vietnam forced a ruthless search for the best solutions to doctrine and power projection in the postVietnam era. That search led directly to the joint-service success of Desert Storm, the other wars of the 1990s, and most recently, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Today, America faces a profoundly uncertain future. Areas once taken for granted as the province of American excellence no longer remain so, or are up for grabs: global air transport, regional air transport, general aviation, even military aircraft development.
The United States is plagued with aging fleets of military aircraft, while potential threats (aircraft and missile systems) proliferate in sophistication and numbers. Declining research investment, and declining student enrolment in air and space studies (down almost 60 percent over the last decade), threaten further degradation of the U.S. national aerospace base.
Worse are mindset problems, the notion that no significant new challenges remain. This s imprisoning culture of complacency argues there is no customer demand, or there is no operational requirement. As W. Edwards Deming famously remarked, no customer ever asked for the light bulb or the pneumatic tire.
And, it might be added, no customer ever asked for the steam engine, the railroad, the gas turbine, the airplane, the transistor, the automobile or airliner.
An industry mindset increasingly reluetant to bel the company on radical new initiatives is an industry that chooses to accept slow, paralytic death from obsolescence. The success the American aerospace industry has enjoyed — for example, with the early monoplane transports, or the 707 or the jumbo jet — came precisely because companies and their leadership were willing to “bet the company” and change paradigms, not from the imprisoning mindsets of quarterly financial statements, the six-decade dominance of the tube and wing airliner, or the reluetance to escape the tyranny of transonic flight.
If the United States truly is serious about being an aerospace nation, it needs to revitalize the governmental-industry partnership, challenge youth who will build the air and space systems of the future, and avoid the mistakes of the part. That will benefit not only this nation, but all those who cherish Western values and the values of a free society.
A year ego, the Commission on the Future of the United States Aerospace Industry concluded, “The time for action is now.” Yes, indeed.
Richard Hallion is an aviation historian who works for the U.S. Department of Defense. The views and opinions presented here are his own.
[Notre recommandation est que ce texte doit être lu avec la mention classique à l'esprit, — “Disclaimer: In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.”]
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