It goes without saying that cartoon characters and cartoonish human characters who get from here to there without motors or wings do fly with our imaginations in an age-old dream of being able to fly without wings OR motors.  There are plenty of precedents, particularly with the story of Daedalus and Icarus and the imagination of Leonardo Da Vinci to the experimentations of Otto Lilienthal and then the Wright Brothers.  And, then there was Buck Rogers whose rocket motor back pack sparked the imagination of this young kid along with thousands of others who were not spooked by being able to do maneuvers in the air like Wilma Deering and the intrepid Buck. Super powered super heroes like Superman and his imitators did it.  They just up and flew without wings or motors.  And, so did I – in my dreams.

I must have been over six years old when I had dreams of flying.  I suddenly was flying (not launched from a roof) over rooftops and avoiding telephone and power lines and slowly crossing territory without rhyme or reason – but flying.  It was a real heady experience until one night I got hung up on wires and tree limbs and realized that I had no business being there.  I also had nightmarish dreams of piloting (actually driving) a huge bus like vehicle but way up in the air in an unbalanced kind of way leaning forward and being sure of falling on my face while speeding along in this “bus”.  But that is neither here nor there and beside the point.  There are folks who at this moment are trying to fly like Rocky the flying squirrel that never seems to be flying with the fictitious characters he hangs out with.  They wear costumes which give them stubby wings with no rigidity and they spread their legs and present a cloth tail, somewhat like the tails of birds.  But, the fictitious examples, the “reality” of my repetitious dreams, and the real experimenter these days all face the same problem.  You can fall down trying to fly and land but you can’t jump up into the air and begin forward travel. And you do need a parachute.

In the newspaper accounts I read today, there was no mention of the Army tests of a backpack “rocket” apparatus that would pick you up and get you from here to there.  Nothing seemed to develop from these experiments a-la-Buck Rodgers.  But there are these folks who want to drop down and glide to a soft landing.  I have to approve their desire to conquer gravity and space in this way but I do not think they will have any more luck than I had in my dreams.

This age old quest is left with the problem not explained by developers: how to defeat gravity, jump up into the air and move with purposeful speed to where you want to go.