While visiting Bowman Field in East Livermore, Maine in honor of their 100 years of flight celebration, I made some very interesting discoveries. First off, while you don’t see many cars that are left from the 1940’s or 1950’s, all of the planes from Bowman were this old or just a wee bit younger. This goes to show that planes lost a long time and that they don’t really age. I also learned more about how you control the plane by using the ailerons and tail rudder. The presenters told us stories and one man had been flying for sixty some odd years. He explained about flying in WWII and how he was gradually allowed to fly more advanced planes. Everyone there said that it is as easy to fly a plane as it is to drive a car. It just seems to me that flying a plane is really complex but maybe it is not.

I had a really awesome time at Bowman Field’s 100 years of flight celebration, It increased my understanding of flight and it was really neat to look inside all of the planes. There were people in planes who took off and then came zooming right over our heads. They were so loud, One time, I thought that my ear drum would burst. The National Guard came and talked to us about the many aviation jobs in the Army. My favorite thing at the airfield was the WWII training plane. A man had bought it while it was deteriorating and he then spent about a whole year restoring it. It was open cockpit and there were two seats. We learned that the pilot sits in the back seat. That caught me by surprise. These 1940’s planes were used as a training plane for someone who had never flown before but had just Joined the air force. The pilot to be’s first 40 hours of training were done in this plane. Well, like I said earlier, the plane was open cockpit. Have you ever wondered why in The pictures of planes from back then, the people are always wearing scarf’s and goggles? Well no, the scarf’s aren’t their to keep the occupants worm but rather to wipe the smoke and grease out of their goggles. That was a fact that I had never even remotely heard of before.

After leaving Bowman Field, some questions started popping in and out of my head. I wonder how aviation has come so far since the Wright Brothers 1903 flyer? I mean, that flight lasted only 12 minutes where now, 747 jumbo jets fly a route from LA to Sydney which takes around 22 hours! That is mind boggling. In addition, another topic that I wondered about was how flying is safe. I mean, even if you are in the biggest plane, you are in a huge sky and anything could happen but it nearly never does. When you hit turbulence, you think that you are going to die but they say that it is just bumps in the air. I would think that the plane would just drop out of the sky but Fm wrong. Flying is generally safe and that is amazing because you are thousands of feet up while in a box with wings. Anything could go wrong.

I have read several books on flight and aviation over the lost several years but in the books, they never tell you how to fly a plane. This is another whole subject that you can only learn if you are right there looking inside the cockpit. You need to experience firsthand what you have to do in order to fly. And, mostly in books, they don’t really tell you about smaller planes like we got to view at Bowman field. This is a totally different part of flying and the pilots who we were able to speak said that you haven’t flown until you’ve been up in one of those two scoters. They mostly navigate by land forms instead of all kinds of high tech instruments. I originally thought that those one engine would fly faster than 85-90 mph because that’s what books portray. But. those planes go just about as fast as a car can. Last but not least, planes are amazing and are a great asset to the world.

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