U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission

U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission Final Report for The Centennial of Flight Commemoration April 2004 - 1 - Table of Contents Page Number Section 1 Executive Summary................................................................................ ..1 Section 2 Introduction ............................................................................................. 2 Section 3 U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission Outreach Summary........................ 6 Section 4 Summary of Events/Programs ……………………………………………..…10 Section 5 National Commemorative Issues ............................................................ 67 Section 6 Licensing Agreements ............................................................................ 68 Section 7 U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission Web Site...................................... 69 Section 8 Evaluation .............................................................................................. 73 Appendices Appendix 1 Points of Contact/Web sites.................................................................... 76 Appendix 2 U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission Budget......................................... 79 Appendix 3 Educational Exhibit Matrix....................................................................... 81 - 2 - Section 1 – Executive Summary Throughout the last year, people across the country have celebrated the human desire for freedom, the power of dreams and the astonishing realities both can create. Eyes have been turned skyward as people of all ages have been fascinated by the wonder of flight. The U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission was established in 1999 to encourage the broadest national and international participation in the celebration of 100 years of powered flight, while publicizing and encouraging programs, projects and events that would involve, educate and enrich the maximum number of people. The results have exceeded the wildest of expectations. The U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission is proud of the events that have taken place, including: the Festival of Flight in Fayetteville, Space Day, Inventing Flight in Dayton, GE Presents Centennial of Flight at Rockefeller Center, EAA’s Countdown to Kitty Hawk tour, the opening of “The Wright Brothers and the Invention of the Aerial Age” at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, the National Air Tours, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ “Evolution of Flight” campaign, Wolf Trap’s Face of America, the opening of the Steven F. Udvar Hazy Center at Dulles International Airport, the First Flight Centennial Celebration in North Carolina and the countless others that have occurred across the country and around the globe. These events, however, would not have been nearly as successful without the involvement of several organizations, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Federal Aviation Administration, the U.S. Air Force and Aviation Week & Space Technology’s Next Century of Flight. Most importantly, the U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission is proud of the educational legacy that has been created. The combined outreach efforts of the U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission and its Partners have reached millions of students. A new generation of inventors has been inspired, igniting a new level of enthusiasm for perseverance and determination in the quest for ingenuity. The U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has been a part of this important, once-in-a-lifetime commemoration. This year has been an amazing celebration of two bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, a century of achievements in aviation and aerospace, and a future of limitless possibilities. - 1 - Section 2 – Introduction by Dr. Tom Crouch “Celebrating A Century of Wings” When the citizens of the distant future look back on the 20th century, they will surely remember it as the time when human beings took to the sky. Images of flight already dominate our memory of the century past. In the fall of 1999, USA Today and the Newseum, an Arlington, Va., museum devoted to the history of news gathering, announced the results of a year-long poll in which 36,000 newspaper readers and a substantial number of journalists were asked to select the top 100 news stories of the century. The atomic bombing of Japan led the public list, followed by the attack on Pearl Harbor, the landing on the moon and the invention of the airplane. The journalists choose precisely the same top four stories, although they did reverse the moon landing and the attack on Pearl Harbor. Was flight really so important in a century marked by war and revolution, hope and despair, and the rise and fall of nations, ideologies and empires? Certainly the results of the poll did not surprise the professional historians who were consulted by the newspaper. Douglas Brinkley of the University of New Orleans commented that Hiroshima was the “correct choice” for the top story. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., countered that the moon walk is what people will remember in 500 years. My personal response was to call attention to the fact that the first three events could not have occurred without the fourth. While caution and concern regarding the long term impact of technology were hallmarks of the late 20th century, most citizens of the aerospace age seem to have preserved their enthusiasm for flight and admiration for those who fly. I can be fairly regarded as something of an authority on public attitudes toward the history of flight. For three decades, exactly half my lifetime, I have been employed at the most significant shrine of the aerospace age. In an average year, nine million people will walk through the doors of the National Air and Space Museum (NASM) -- 14 million in our best year. We welcome more visitors than the British Museum, the American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan or the Louvre. It is the most visited museum in the world. When NASM opened to the public on July 1, 1976, the staff was confident of success, but no one expected the enormous number of visitors who arrived that first summer, or the wave of media enthusiasm that washed over the building. President Gerald Ford commented that the museum was “our bicentennial birthday present to ourselves.” In fact, those of us who planned the museum could take only limited credit for its success. The quality of the NASM collection is a far more important factor. What other museum in the world, covering any subject, can offer such riches? Visitors to the NASM can see the world’s first airplane; the world’s first military airplane; the first airplane to fly around the world; the Spirit of St. Louis; the Lockheed Vega that Amelia Earhart flew across the Atlantic; Wiley Post’s Winnie Mae; Howard Hughes’ classic H-1 racing aircraft; the B-29 Enola Gay; the Bell X-1 that Capt. Charles Yeager, he of the right stuff, first flew faster than sound; the world’s fastest airplane; the first airplane to fly around the world non-stop and un-refueled; the first balloon to circumnavigate the globe; the first helicopter to fly around the world; the world’s oldest liquid propellant rocket; the spacecraft that carried the first American into orbit; and the Apollo 11 Command Module that brought the first human beings to walk on the surface of another world home again. And that is only the tip of our iceberg. - 2 - But the core of the museum’s appeal runs deeper even than the opportunity to see the actual aircraft and spacecraft in which intrepid men and women wrote the history of the 20th century in the sky. However one assesses the immediate consequences of aviation, flight remains one of the most stunning and magnificent of human achievements. People flock to the NASM from around the world because this is a museum that makes them feel proud to be human, members of a species that has achieved these wonders. Surely, a century of wings is something worth celebrating. That was the thought animating a diverse group of people across the nation who initiated planning for the Centennial of Flight a decade ago. From the outset, there was universal agreement that this would be a grassroots celebration, in which interested folks, from national aviation organizations to local communities, would craft their own unique events. The U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission and the First Flight Centennial Federal Advisory Board, which emerged in their final form from the Congress in 1999, were charged with coordinating all of those activities, and providing the visibility and cohesion required for a truly national commemoration. It was an approach that succeeded. The centennial year was filled with a wide range of activities that gave millions of Americans an opportunity to participate in the celebration. The U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission’s online calendar listed a total of 545 events from January 1, 2003 to December 17, 2003. There were art exhibitions, museum displays, lecture series, symposia, air shows, flight academies, professional conferences, kite contests, air races, fly ins, and celebrations and festivals of every stripe. They ranged from the purely local, like the special flight focus given to the 54th annual Coconino County Fair in Flagstaff, Ariz., to events like Rockefeller Center’s salute to the Centennial, which attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors and national media attention. The events that are the highpoints of every aviation year, such as the annual Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) AirVenture Convention and the Dayton

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