Think of it as Yoga for the brain, we are going to stretch a bit.
When the Impossible Became Ordinary: Amelia Earhart, Mark Twain, and the Future of Flight
An imagined conversation between two Americans who never had the opportunity to meet — Mark Twain, who lived long enough to witness humanity's first powered flights, and Amelia Earhart, who helped turn aviation from an experiment into a new frontier.
Somewhere Above the Clouds
Mark Twain looked out the window and frowned.
There was nothing particularly unusual about Mark Twain frowning. He had spent a considerable portion of his life discovering new things for mankind to be disappointed about.
But this particular problem was different.
He was sitting comfortably in a chair approximately 35,000 feet above Kansas.
There was a cup of coffee on the tray in front of him.
The coffee wasn’t very good.
This, Twain decided, was reassuring. And he remember a quote from the Bible, “Now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.” — Genesis 11:6, KJV
Humanity might have conquered the heavens, but apparently there were limits.
Across the aisle sat a slender woman with short hair, a leather flying jacket and the unmistakable expression of someone who would rather be in the cockpit.
Twain studied her.
TWAIN: Amelia Earhart, I presume.
EARHART: Mark Twain.
TWAIN: I’ve been dead longer than you’ve been missing, so I suppose introductions are unnecessary.
Earhart smiled.
EARHART: Where are we?
Twain looked out the window again.
TWAIN: According to that little illuminated map on the seat in front of me, we’re traveling roughly five hundred miles an hour, seven miles above the Earth, while two hundred people complain that the wireless internet is too slow.
Earhart leaned toward the window.
Far below them, farms looked like squares on a chessboard.
Then she looked toward the wing.
No struts.
No wires.
No exposed cylinders.
Two enormous jet engines hung beneath it.
EARHART: Five hundred miles an hour?
TWAIN: Apparently this is considered ordinary.
Earhart laughed.
EARHART: That’s the remarkable part.
August 25, 1932
Ninety-four years ago today, Amelia Earhart completed something that was anything but ordinary.
On August 24, 1932, she departed Los Angeles in her bright red Lockheed Vega 5B, NR-7952.
Nineteen hours and five minutes later, on August 25, she landed in Newark, New Jersey.
She had traveled approximately 2,447 miles without stopping, becoming the first woman to fly solo and nonstop across the continental United States. (National Air and Space Museum)
The red Vega was already famous.
Only three months earlier, Earhart had flown the same airplane solo across the Atlantic, becoming the first woman—and only the second person after Charles Lindbergh—to accomplish that feat. (National Air and Space Museum)
She affectionately called the aircraft her “Little Red Bus.”
Today that airplane survives in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum collection.
But perhaps the more remarkable artifact is not the airplane.
It is the world that grew out of airplanes like it.
“You Mean Everybody Does This?”
Earhart continued examining the modern airliner.
EARHART: How many airplanes like this are there?
Twain reached for the glowing screen.
TWAIN: Enough that nobody seems impressed by them anymore.
That might have surprised Earhart more than the jet engines.
Today, the FAA handles more than 45,000 flights on an average day in the United States and serves roughly 2.9 million airline passengers daily. (Federal Aviation Administration)
Worldwide, commercial airlines carried nearly five billion passengers on approximately 38 million flights in 2025. (ICAO)
Five billion passenger journeys.
Earhart stared at Twain.
EARHART: Five billion?
TWAIN: Humanity finally achieved the impossible and immediately began complaining about boarding groups.
EARHART: Do people understand what they’re doing?
TWAIN: Certainly not. That would spoil it.
When Flying Was Science Fiction
Twain leaned back.
TWAIN: Of course, people dreamed about flying long before either of us.
EARHART: They dreamed about it before they knew how.
TWAIN: That’s generally how invention works. First a lunatic suggests something impossible. Then respectable people explain why it cannot be done. Then an engineer does it. Finally a businessman charges admission.
Earhart laughed.
One of the great lunatics had been Jules Verne.
In Robur the Conqueror, published in 1886, Verne imagined an enormous electrically powered flying machine called the Albatross.
At a time when balloons dominated serious discussion of aviation, Verne’s fictional engineer Robur argued passionately that the future belonged to machines heavier than air.
Verne even imagined humanity ultimately mastering the atmosphere much as ships had mastered the sea. (Project Gutenberg)
That was seventeen years before the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk.
EARHART: Jules Verne would have enjoyed this airplane.
TWAIN: Jules Verne would have taken one look at it and demanded royalties.
The Prophets of the Air
Verne wasn’t alone.
For centuries, writers and dreamers treated flight as a way of escaping the boundaries imposed upon human beings.
Leonardo da Vinci sketched flying machines based on the anatomy of birds.
Cyrano de Bergerac imagined fantastic voyages beyond Earth in the seventeenth century.
Jules Verne populated the nineteenth century with submarines, lunar voyages and mechanical aircraft.
H.G. Wells imagined aerial warfare becoming a force capable of overturning nations.
Rudyard Kipling’s 1905 story “With the Night Mail” imagined a future world knitted together by enormous aircraft transporting mail through the night skies.
The writers differed on what flying would mean.
Some saw freedom.
Some saw commerce.
Some saw war.
Some saw exploration.
They were all correct.
Twain Had Seen the Beginning
There is another reason Twain belongs in this conversation.
Samuel Clemens died in 1910.
That means Mark Twain lived long enough to see reports of the Wright brothers’ first powered flight in 1903 and the astonishing aviation experiments that followed.
Imagine the change contained inside one lifetime.
Twain was born in 1835, when the steam locomotive was still transforming America.
He saw riverboats dominate the Mississippi.
He watched railroads span the continent.
He witnessed the telegraph collapse communication distances.
He lived through the invention of the telephone.
The automobile arrived.
Electricity transformed cities.
Then, near the end of his life, mankind began flying.
Had Twain lived another twenty-two years, he could have watched Amelia Earhart climb into her Vega.
Amelia’s Inspiration Was More Practical
Twain turned toward her.
TWAIN: Did Jules Verne make you want to fly?
Earhart shook her head.
EARHART: Not really.
And historically, that distinction matters.
Earhart’s path into aviation wasn’t primarily the romantic story of a child reading science fiction and deciding to conquer the clouds.
It was more immediate.
While serving as a Red Cross nurse’s aide in Toronto during World War I, she attended a flying exhibition in 1918.
Then, in December 1920, veteran pilot Frank Hawks took her on her first airplane ride in California.
Earhart later recalled that once she left the ground, she knew she had to fly herself. (National Air and Space Museum)
She began lessons with pioneering female aviator Anita “Neta” Snook.
To pay for them, Earhart worked jobs including telephone clerk and photographer.
She soloed in 1921.
In 1922 she bought her first airplane, a yellow Kinner Airster, and soon established a women’s altitude record of 14,000 feet.
In 1923 she became only the 16th woman to receive an official international pilot license. (National Air and Space Museum)
Earhart had also grown up collecting newspaper clippings about accomplished women.
Her inspirations were therefore not merely machines.
They were people who demonstrated that accepted limits could be crossed.
The Little Red Bus
Twain pointed through the imaginary clouds.
TWAIN: And your red airplane?
EARHART: The Vega.
TWAIN: A cheerful color for something in which one intends to challenge death.
Earhart’s Lockheed Vega was one of the technological marvels of its day.
Designed around ideas pioneered by Jack Northrop, its sleek wooden monocoque fuselage and cantilever wing created an unusually streamlined aircraft.
Only 131 Vegas were built, but they became favorites among record-setting aviators including Earhart, Wiley Post, Jimmie Mattern and Jacqueline Cochran. (National Air and Space Museum)
Earhart’s Vega was modified for long-distance flying.
Additional fuel tanks brought its capacity to approximately 420 gallons, giving it a range near 3,200 miles. Its cockpit included multiple compasses, a directional gyro and a drift indicator—but nothing remotely resembling GPS. (National Air and Space Museum)
There was no satellite navigation.
No digital weather radar.
No autopilot comparable to modern airliners.
No global air traffic management network watching her progress.
No jet engines.
And certainly no flight attendant bringing coffee.
From 19 Hours to Five
Earhart’s 1932 Los Angeles-to-Newark flight required 19 hours and 5 minutes.
Today a nonstop commercial flight between Los Angeles and the New York area commonly takes roughly five to six hours depending on winds and routing.
And the modern passenger spends much of that time doing things that would have looked supernatural in 1932.
Watching movies stored digitally.
Following the aircraft’s exact position by satellite.
Sending messages across continents.
Consulting a map of the entire planet.
Sometimes conducting a business meeting.
All while traveling faster than the fastest racing aircraft of Earhart’s era.
EARHART: People can talk to someone on the ground while they’re flying?
TWAIN: Constantly.
EARHART: Anywhere in the world?
TWAIN: More or less.
Earhart considered this.
EARHART: That’s extraordinary.
TWAIN: It was much more peaceful when they couldn’t.
Then Came the Jets
The progression following Earhart’s era was breathtaking.
In the 1930s, commercial aviation began connecting major cities.
World War II accelerated aircraft engineering enormously.
Pressurized cabins made high-altitude travel practical.
Radar transformed navigation and traffic control.
Then came the jet engine.
By the late 1950s, aircraft such as the Boeing 707 were shrinking oceans.
The Boeing 747 later turned international aviation into mass transportation.
Supersonic Concorde passengers briefly crossed the Atlantic faster than sound.
Cargo aircraft created worldwide logistics systems.
Helicopters made vertical flight practical.
Satellite navigation eventually allowed pilots to know their position within meters.
And now unmanned aircraft fly without anyone aboard.
The FAA currently lists more than 837,000 registered drones and roughly 482,000 certificated remote pilots in the United States alone. (Federal Aviation Administration)
Twain raised an eyebrow.
TWAIN: So now the airplanes don’t even require people?
EARHART: Some don’t.
TWAIN: That may be the first genuine improvement.
Flight Became Invisible Infrastructure
Perhaps the greatest aviation achievement is one Earhart might have appreciated most.
Flying stopped being remarkable.
It became infrastructure.
Fresh flowers cut in South America can appear in North American stores the following morning.
Replacement machine parts cross oceans overnight.
Medical supplies travel between continents.
Families separated by thousands of miles can see each other within hours.
A traveler can eat breakfast in New York and dinner in London.
Entire industries—tourism, international manufacturing, express delivery, global business—depend upon aviation functioning reliably every day.
The skies that Verne imagined conquering became another highway.
Except the highway is three-dimensional.
And Yet Amelia Might Recognize the Problem
Earhart looked around the cabin once more.
EARHART: Nearly five billion passengers.
TWAIN: Yes.
EARHART: Millions of flights.
TWAIN: Yes.
EARHART: Satellites telling airplanes where they are.
TWAIN: Yes.
EARHART: Computers flying them.
TWAIN: Quite a lot of the time.
She looked out the window.
EARHART: And people are bored?
Twain smiled.
TWAIN: That, Miss Earhart, may be the most dependable characteristic of civilization. Turn a miracle into something reliable and mankind will soon complain that it doesn’t have enough legroom.
What Jules Verne Got Right
The remarkable thing about Jules Verne wasn’t that every technical prediction was correct.
Many weren’t.
His genius was recognizing a pattern.
Technology tends to turn geographic barriers into engineering problems.
Oceans once divided civilizations.
Ships reduced that barrier.
Continents were enormous.
Railroads compressed them.
Distance limited communication.
Telegraph, telephone and radio attacked that problem.
Then aviation attacked distance itself.
In Robur the Conqueror, Verne imagined humanity becoming master of the atmosphere through machines heavier than air. (Project Gutenberg)
That future arrived.
But even Verne might have underestimated its scale.
From Dreamer to Daredevil to Passenger
There is a wonderful sequence hidden inside the history of aviation.
First came the dreamers.
They imagined flight.
Then came the inventors.
They proved that flight was possible.
Then came the daredevils and record setters.
They demonstrated what aircraft could actually accomplish.
Earhart belonged to that generation.
Finally came the engineers, manufacturers, airport builders, mechanics, meteorologists, controllers and airline crews who performed perhaps the hardest trick of all:
They made the extraordinary routine.
Amelia Looks Down
The imaginary jet began descending.
Cities appeared beneath the clouds.
Highways.
Houses.
Airports.
Hundreds of aircraft scattered across the landscape.
Earhart watched quietly.
Twain finally broke the silence.
TWAIN: What do you think?
She continued looking outside.
EARHART: I think we always imagined that the great accomplishment would be learning to fly.
She paused.
EARHART: Perhaps the greater accomplishment was making it possible for everyone else to fly.
Twain nodded.
TWAIN: There’s a dangerous idea.
EARHART: Why?
TWAIN: Because once mankind discovers that the impossible can become ordinary, somebody invariably starts wondering what other impossible thing ought to become ordinary.
Earhart smiled.
EARHART: Good.
On This Day
On August 25, 1932, Amelia Earhart landed her red Lockheed Vega in Newark after flying nonstop from Los Angeles.
Nineteen hours.
Five minutes.
One pilot.
One engine.
No GPS.
It was a record.
Today, tens of thousands of aircraft move through American skies every day, while worldwide commercial aviation carries billions of passengers each year. (ICAO)
The impossible became ordinary.
And somewhere between Jules Verne imagining the conquest of the air, the Wright brothers proving a machine could fly, and Amelia Earhart pointing her Little Red Bus toward the opposite coast, humanity learned one of its most valuable lessons:
Science fiction has a peculiar habit of becoming engineering.
And engineering, given enough time, has an even stranger habit.
It becomes something we complain about while waiting for our luggage.
On August 25, 1932, Amelia Earhart completed the first solo nonstop transcontinental flight across the United States by a woman. Flying her bright red Lockheed Vega 5B, nicknamed the “Little Red Bus,” she landed in Newark, New Jersey, after departing Los Angeles the previous day and spending about 19 hours in the air. The flight covered roughly 2,450 miles and further established Earhart as one of the most accomplished and recognizable aviators of her era.
