The Art of Aeronautics

Abstract

As the Society's Centenary celebrations have shown, man first flew by sheer enthusiasm (and very little else). Many successful pioneers of aeronautics were untrained as engineers or scientists but—if art is the creation of form symbolic of feeling by “selection, not alteration”, then they were indeed artists.By what means were their dynamic visions engendered?—how was their faith sustained? —and by what near-magical process of innovation was the utter beauty of man's flight attained? Although most of aviation is now engineering, the best of that remains an art. Where the engineer's factual experience nears its limits he relies for many of his ideas, attitudes and motivations on such everyday services as books, films, plays, newspapers and so on. The availability of relevant information at appropriate times has a critical bearing on the success of any project.The efficient presentation of information is in itself an art, and the part played by those other artists who feed the aviation community with data—labouring to meet press dates, struggling on location, painting pictures or drawing cartoons—remains a vital force in the growth of aeronautics. Centenary Year would be incomplete without due acknowledgment of their efforts, and here are recorded a few examples of their achievements.