My interest in aviation is largely based on the nostalgia and romance. Every aircraft is entwined by that contingent of humanity that I wrote about earlier. To negate one airplane would also negate all of those who were involved with it.
There is a DC-3 in our collection. One day an elderly man came and sat in it for hours - lost in his own world of memories and emotions. He was the only surviving member of a DC-3 flight crew that crashed fifty years earlier. It was the first time he had stepped back into a DC-3 since the crash. It was something that he just had to do before he died.
That, Sir, is a beautifully put expression of the ineffable side of pursuing a cause or upholding a principle that cannot be realised without engagement and rarely imparted to the disinterested. Paul Garber used to get a long ladder for Charles Lindbergh to climb up into
The Spirit of St Louis after closing time. He would sit up there for an hour at a time, thinking who know's what?