On 17th December 1903, the Wright brothers defied gravity, and flew the first ever controlled flight of a heavier-than-air aircraft.?That flight lasted just 12 seconds, climbed barely 10 feet and covered only 120 feet.?
Yet, it launched the human conquest of the air, leaping over the terrestrial obstacles - jungles, rivers, mountains and oceans - and shrank the earth forever.?
A gust of wind toppled and irreparably damaged the ¡®Wright Flyer¡¯ that very day, but it remains a lasting symbol of human quest into the unknown and the uncharted.?
No wonder, Neil Armstrong carried a piece of fabric from that airplane when he stepped on the moon in 1969.
John Glenn, the first American astronaut to circle the earth in 1962, repeated the feat in 1998 at the age of 77. He too carried a piece of the ¡®Wright Flyer¡¯ airplane.?
In April 2021, NASA¡¯s ¡®Ingenuity¡¯ helicopter landed on Mars, carrying a piece of - you guessed it - the ¡®Wright Flyer!¡¯
That historic flight in 1903 also opened up the third dimension to war, which till then was confined to land and the sea.?
As the land warriors discovered to their delight, this new toy offered new qualities - height, speed and reach.
Every army through history has wanted to know the strength and spread of the enemy forces, hence the quest for a hill, or a ¡®high ground¡¯ to see farther.?
So, the airplanes were first used as ¡®scouts¡¯ to see and report the enemy deployments in World War I.
It wasn¡¯t long before the ground forces turned their guns upwards, but they rarely hit any, because unlike the static troops in trenches, the planes were fast and agile.
Some thought, and surprisingly, still do, that an airplane was simply an extension of the artillery, but it is more than that.?
The light and fragile airplanes of those times could carry little bomb-load, and the harm they caused was negligible, but they could fly deep into the enemy¡¯s homeland, far away from the front-lines.?
So, they caused anger and frustration well beyond the physical damage, affecting public opinion and the morale of the people.
The shock effect of an air strike was much more than the destruction, because the airplanes could appear without warning, do the damage, and disappear instantly.?
Soon, opposing airplanes began to shoot at each other, to achieve ¡®control of the air,¡¯ because, as the fighting forces realised, ¡®he who controls the air, controls everything else on the surface.¡¯
In World War II, Hitler¡¯s army occupied Western Europe at lightning speed, but had to halt at the English Channel. They could not cross just 21 miles of water without being able to control the air above.?
For that, the German Air Force (Luftwaffe) had to first defeat the Royal Air Force in the air, which they couldn¡¯t, and that altered the history of the war, and indeed the world.
In a fitting tribute to the young fighter pilots who defended the British Isles, Winston Churchill famously said, ¡°Never in the history of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.¡±?
The mighty navies of the time, that ruled the seas and spread empires around the globe, suddenly became vulnerable to a well-aimed bomb from a single airplane.?
Many famous ¡®Naval¡¯ battles in World War II were won without the opposing fleets coming within sighting distance, with only their airplanes destroying the opposing ships.?
Allied bombings, which included bursting the dams that generated power for the factories, also helped win the war, as the Germans could no longer continue the military production to supply their forces.??
When USA dropped nuclear weapons on Japan in 1945, the sheer scale of devastation forced the Japanese to surrender, before a single American soldier set foot on the Japanese mainland.
But, despite its obvious advantages, Air Power seems confusing.?
Churchill found it the ¡®most difficult of all forms of military force to measure.¡¯?
To someone else, it seemed ¡®seductive¡ like modern courtship, as it appears to offer gratification without commitment.¡¯
Air Power could be intimidating or exhilarating, depending on which end of the missile is pointing at you - the nose, with the weapon getting closer and bigger; or the tail, with the armament zooming away in your aiming sight.
In 1971, the Indian Air Force gained complete control of the air over East Pakistan, which allowed our Army and the Navy to move freely, resulting in the surrender of 90,000 Pakistani troops, and the creation of Bangladesh, in just 14 days.?
We will cover the major air actions of that war on the occasion of its 50th Anniversary.?Watch this space.?
The writer is a former fighter pilot of the IAF and now a commercial airline pilot. He is the author of two books and many blog posts, available at?www.avinashchikte.com