"One of the saddest stories of the 20th century is the fate of air travel."

Or the Holocaust.

Or Stalin murdering 10 million folks.

Certainly one of those three.

Did you read the article? The author is clearly referring to where we were at the beginning of the 20th century w/r to air travel (it didn't exist but was associated with a modern utopia), and where we were at the end of the century. It's a romantic lament, to be sure, but if you actually read the article the sentence fits as a lede.

And as a Jew, those epic failures of humanity, to me, provide a stark relief to the promise of globalization afforded by air travel. They represent the breakdown of (slowly) dying nationalistic geopolitics. Air travel was one hopeful cure made ugly in reality.

That comment above is really bothering me. I suppose it's a mix of the callous disregard of the context in which the sentence lies and as a reflection of where we sit after maybe 15 years of a popular worldwide internet. To me, this quote now springs to mind:

"One of the saddest stories of the 21th century is the fate of human communication."

And yet, it's only 2008.

I also find it unusually bothersome. We all feel like being snarky bitches sometimes, which is mostly okay. I just expect those posts to get downvoted here.

Now that I read the replies, I wish I had thought twice about uploading the "one of those three" comment. You're right, HN deserves better.

Seriously? If we manage to turn space travel into a "mundane chore", I'll be very happy indeed.

But then you likely won't be alive and your children's children won't see what the big deal is (was).

Shoot, how many today pause to consider the wonder that is a photograph of Earth taken from space. And that was only 40-50 years ago.

> But then you likely won't be alive and your children's children won't see what the big deal is (was).

But we'll finally make that delivery to Ebola 9, the virus planet.

In a Q&A at UNC in 1996 (part 1 of which is linked below), Warren Buffett noted that doing the math from the Wright brothers all the way through 1996, the airline industry overall had yet to make a dime of profit.

The silver lining is that perhaps that failure is wiped out by the amount of unrelated profit-making that flight has enabled. But it's still quite weird that flying passengers around is so hard to build a business around.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApjnM0fIjXg

He seems to be saying that air-travel went from nothing to 2/3 of the way there, and he's sad b/c some startup hasn't yet made it fun and easier.

People have overwhelmingly chosen cheap, above fun or easy.

It's sad that both fun and easy had to get worse in order to make it cheap (or is that a side effect?). Bring back the zeppelin!

It's sad that believe this stuff is sad.