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What can you conceive more silly and extravagant than to suppose a man racking his brains and studying night and day how to fly?
William Law
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What can you conceive more silly and extravagant than to suppose a man racking his brains and studying night and day how to fly?

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You are supposed to know how to fly or you would not be here. You will now learn to fly all over again. Our way. I have examined your logbooks. They contain some interesting and clever lies. If you are lucky and work a good solid eighteen hours a day in this school, it is barely possible that a few of you may succeed in actually going out on the line-that is, if the company is still in such desperate need of pilots that it will hire anybody who wears his wings in his lapel and walks slowly past the front door.

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_it was even more disconcerting to examine your charts before a proposed flight only to find that in many cases the bulk of the terrain over which you had to fly was bluntly marked: __NSURVEYED._ It was as if the mapmakers had said, __e are aware that between this spot and that one, there are several hundred thousands of acres, but until you make a forced landing there, we won__ know whether it is mud, desert, or jungle _ and the chances are we won__ know then!

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Workers must root out the idea that by keeping the results of their labors to themselves a fortune will be assured to them. Patent fees are so much wasted money. The flying machine of the future will not be born fully fledged and capable of a flight for 1,000 miles or so. Like everything else it must be evolved gradually. The first difficulty is to get a thing that will fly at all. When this is made, a full description should be published as an aid to others. Excellence of design and workmanship will always defy competition. (1894)