Fifty years ago today on the beach at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville and Wilber Wright pioneered in achieving flight with heavier-than-air craft. The associated industries that have grown up around the airplane during its half-century of existence new provide work for over half a million people. In the midst of the growth of these industries, a striking change has taken place in the attitude of the public toward aviation. Once considered a dream of impractical man, aviation today has an honored place among vocations and professions.

Where it would have been considered daring to make a career of aviation a quarter of a century ago, there is not only prestige, but capital in the business of airplanes and air travel.

There are two distinct divisions of enterprise in the aviation industry, the production of airplanes, and their operation. In huge plants throughout the country, aircraft corporations transform the dreams of designers and engineers into safe, comfortable, speedy vehicles of a new medium of transportation, the air.

A revolution in thinking has come with the increasing number of airplanes from the assembly line. Distance, always measured in hours and not in miles, shrinks every year as faster and faster aircraft are built. At present there are no two places on earth more than 36 hours away from one another. People in a hurry utilize an industry unthought of twenty years ago. The country is crisscrossed with the routes of air lines. It is as easy to fly to Bermuda from New York as it is to drive to Boston, and it takes no more time.

It is a sign of the stability of this new industry that it provides more and more openings for college graduates. College men have invested in four years of education, and few are willing to risk their investment by starting a career in an unsound or risky profession. Unfortunately for the liberal arts major, however, by far the greatest number of jobs open to college graduates will go to men trained in some technical skill, who go by the general name of engineers. With all the recent advances in science, never before have the prospects been so bright for the prospective engineer.

The Curtiss-Wright Corporation, one of America's largest manufacturers of airplane equipment, sums up the opportunities for a young engineer in its 1953 brochure: "For the aeronautical research worker and engineer, there is an evergrowing challenge to contribute to the progress of a field firmly established, yet limitless in potentialities. Working daily at the threshhold of the unknown will bring the engineer into many closely related fields. An aircraft increase in size and speed, the role of the engineer and research worker becomes even more important."

Engineering A Keystone

The brochure goes on to say, "Engineering is the keystone of the organization." This attitude is the determining factor in the employment programs of all major aviation companies. In recruiting college graduate material, the emphasis is on men with technical training.

Most of the work, however, that is carried on in this industry--the actual manufacturing processes, lathing, machine shop work, operation of testing apparatus, and so on, is done by men without college degrees. Opportunities for pure science majors lie in engineering: research, design, and development. Nevertheless, the chief shortage in the aircraft Industry today is in trained technical personnel. Engineers are in great demand in an ever-increasing and accelerating scope of investigation.

For the liberal arts major, advertising, contract selling, all the white collar occupations are available' here as in any other industry. Good selling and desk jobs need filling for the aviation people in todays' complicated business environment, but companies don't scout for men to fill them. The search is for the future inventor of an economical rocket, a foolproof de-icer, or a radical new wing design.

An unfortunate development of this constantly expanding frontier of science is tied up with the growing complexity and diversity of the industry. The white collar workers are growing more and more divorced from the technical aspects of airplane design and construction. The industry has reached the point in its development where the founders, once contemptuously called dreamers, have had to hire accountants and all the tribe of regular and orderly minds to keep tabs on their sprouting colossus.

Quick Conselldation

It has been typical of other industries that after a period of growth and expansion, there has come a time for consolidation of gains, perhaps even retrenchment, followed by decline or new growth as new processes are developed. This process has been true in the aviation industry, but far accelerated by the continued crises of the last two decades. With the present world tension, and the almost incredible advances made by the designer and innovator, the period of consolidation immediately following World-War II was very short.

The industry has kept growing and expanding despite the temporary letdown when military orders were slowed in the period of disarmament. The current need for fighting planes will not slack off soon. In fact, it promises to increase. Experimentation is going on in subsonic, transonic, and supersonic flight--new developments are coming on in reciprocating (propeller driven), turbo-prop (combination jet and reciprocating), ram jet, and rocket engines.

In the near future, the whole field promises to be revolutionized by the effective development of a power plant driven by atomic energy. As military planes get bigger and faster, private planes grow more economical to operate. Since the last war, the booming air transportation industry has aided the airplane manufacturers to swell the volume of planes produced.