Flights of Fancy  Aircraft I will never get to fly  April 1,
2005  Aviation has never been an industry to stand still. For
years, new designs, ideas, and innovations were tested,
scrapped, modified, or put into use, all in the interest of
enhancing the general safety record of airplanes. As accident
records improved, other considerations came to the fore, such as
going fast, flying passengers in large numbers over great
distances, gaining range, and improving endurance with
retractable landing gear and constant-speed propellers. Nowhere
is the evolution of aerial machinery more evident than in the
years that encompassed World War II, when fabric-covered
biplanes gave way to great machines such as the Boeing B-17 and
B-29, the North American P-51, the Douglas DC-3, and, toward the
end of the war, the first jet-powered machines. In 1947, Chuck
Yeager broke the sound barrier. Remarkable, and hard to fathom
for most people.  Arguably, a similarly impressive evolution in
technology took place in the 1960s and 1970