The Future Revealed Itself…


The people in this story knew as much about tomorrow as we do today. Which is to say, very little. The future revealed itself to them the same way it reveals itself to us, minute by minute. They faced it with human tools: courage, imagination, intelligence, humor, fear, and anxiety, and they lived, ate, drank, slept, fought, made love, and worked just like we do today, in near utter ignorance of what tomorrow might bring. The lucky ones were able to laugh about it. A man can only know what he knows, when he knows it. There are no predetermined outcomes. There is no fate. Much could have occurred. Only one thing did. That is history: that does not make it inevitable. Only hindsight makes it seem so. Otherwise, history is like life, a chaotic matrix of alternate possible outcomes, of choices people make, actions they take, distilling into the moment we inherit.

This is a story, a flying story, a story about an airline and the people who built it during the crux decades of the Twentieth Century. It also happens to be true.

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