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Gene Breiner got a little choked up when he handed over his 1929 Fleet Model 2 to the National Air and Space Museum at “Become a Pilot” Day on Saturday. He dedicated it to “all the people who learned to fly in her, and all the people I took for their first and last airplane rides in her.” In the first category, that would be hundreds.

Chet Machamer in the Fleet Model 2 leaves little doubt that flying is fun.

The Fleet was the first aircraft designed to be a civilian trainer. That’s why Breiner’s Fleet, one of six Model 2’s remaining, earned a place at the Museum. This particular airplane was used in the Civilian Pilot Training Program, a U.S. Government effort begun in 1938 with the stated purpose of boosting general aviation. (An unstated purpose was to boost the number of U.S. pilots as war brewed in Europe.)

One of the students who learned to fly in Breiner’s Fleet was on hand for Saturday’s ceremony. In fact, 16-year-old Chet Machamer soloed the airplane that very morning. With his airline-pilot dad along, he flew it from Bermudian Valley Airpark in East Berlin, Pennsylvania, to Frederick, Maryland, where Breiner took over and flew, also with John Machamer, the last leg to the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles Airport in Virginia.

Machamer had already flown the long solo trip required for his pilot’s license in a J-2 Cub, but he preferred flying the Fleet. “The J2 is only 36 horsepower,” his dad explained. “He always complains that he can’t keep up with the big trucks on the highway.”

What did it feel like to solo in the Fleet? Chet, whose dad is also his flight instructor, said, “It was definitely different with a lot less weight.” His dad, the weight, replied, “That’s my son.”

We’ll have more about the Fleet in our September issue—including the story of how Breiner found and restored it. Pretty nice that on its last day of flying, the airplane did what it was invented to do: Help a novice rack up flying time on the way to becoming a pilot.

“One of the interesting things about airships,” says Tom Crouch, a senior curator at the National Air and Space Museum, who gave a lecture on the subject this week as part of the Museum’s Ask an Expert series, is that they were “transitional technology. They were capable of doing a great many things before airplanes were. They didn’t carry passengers as well as airplanes do, they couldn’t go to war as well as airplanes do, but they could carry significant loads over significant distances, long before airplanes did.”

The U.S. Navy ZRS-4 "Akron," June 13, 1932. Photograph courtesy NASM.

Take the story of the Akron and Macon. Both were rigid American airships, built by the Goodyear Zeppelin Company in Akron, Ohio. “The problem the Navy faced between the wars, was, what are you going to do with these things?” says Crouch. “Are you going to use them as scouts? This thing is almost 900 feet long, painted silver, it can’t fly very high, and it can’t go very fast. So the enemy is going to see it coming. So what they did is really kind of a Hail Mary pass…. They decided that the Akron and Macon would become flying aircraft carriers.”

A Curtiss F9C-2 Sparrowhawk hooked on to the trapeze and hoist arrangement of the USS Macon. Photograph courtesy NASM.

The two airships were supposed to fly ahead of the fleet, looking for the enemy. When they found them, the airships would launch fighters—the Curtiss F9C-2 Sparrowhawk—from inside the airship. (The Museum has the only Sparrowhawk left above water.) There was a hangar deck inside the ship’s belly, and the Akron and Macon could carry five fighters each. A trapeze bar would descend from the belly to release the airplanes.

When the Macon went down off the coast of California on February 12, 1935, she took four of the aircraft with her. “She’s 17,000 feet down,” says Crouch, “at the bottom of the Pacific, and when you look at the submersible pictures of the Macon, you can still see the top wing of four of these airplanes sticking up out of the silt.” )

Airships, Crouch says, “were the work of a little band of true believers.” The greatest of them all, Admiral William Moffett, was on board the Akron when it was lost off the New Jersey coast on April 4, 1933. Seventy-three of the 76 passengers and crew on board were killed.

Moffett, although not a pilot, was chosen in 1921 to head the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics. In a somewhat harsh assessment, the Maxwell Air Force Base Web site describes the admiral as having “an unfortunate affection for airships, a technological dead end that squandered millions of dollars.”

On September 1, 1933, Naval Air Station Sunnyvale was renamed Moffett Field in the admiral’s honor.

Rear Admiral William Moffett, Chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics, and Henry Ford, standing in front of a Naval Aircraft Factory UO-2 at the National Airplane Races in Detroit. Photograph courtesy NASM.

Airbus calls its Concept Plane for 2050 an aircraft “inspired by nature.” But it sure includes a lot of technology.

“The idea is to move out from the old-fashioned class system—first class, business class, economy class—and think more about the experience,” says Airbus chief engineer Charles Champion in an interview with The (London) Telegraph. “So the idea is, you approach the plane, you put your hand close to the door, immediately the plane recognizes you, shows you toward your seat, takes care [of] your luggage, and then you’ve got basically a choice within a ‘smart tech’ zone, and a more revitalizing ‘relaxing’ zone.”

For Type A personalities, the cabin’s Smart Tech zone includes an “energy harvesting system” that uses body heat to power the aircraft and light the cabin. Morphing seats adapt to the passenger’s body; each individual’s budget dictates the amount of comfort and space. (Why does this bring to mind Oliver Twist and his bowl of gruel? Please, sir, I want some more.) “You might be traveling alone,” says an Airbus press release, “but holographics, communication technologies and sound showers let you work with your colleagues…” Great.

Never leave the office: work with holographic co-workers in flight. Courtesy Airbus.

Passengers looking to get away from work might choose the Vitalising zone, which offers panoramic views outside the aircraft (the fuselage becomes transparent “with the wave of a hand”). There you can veg in your “intelligent organically grown seat” that will offer you a massage, a drink, a gentle sea breeze or the scent of a pine forest.

Multi-task: Play golf while flying to your destination. Courtesy Airbus.

If you’re like many overworked Americans who never take a vacation, perhaps you’d like to consider the flight itself “a holiday experience.” Head over to the Interaction zone, where you can belly up to the bar or access a “pop-up pod” that “will offer more private spaces that can be used for…a romantic meal.” (Among other things.) Go shopping in the aircraft’s holographic mall, or play tennis, baseball, golf, or “newer options like Airbus Fusion Ball, which lets you play catch across the skyscrapers of New York or the peaks of the Himalayas!”

If you haven’t seen it yet, take a look at this video of the Martin Aircraft Company’s recent mile-high test of its personal jetpack and safety parachute system. The flight topped out at 5,000 feet, but could have gone higher. While a dummy was on board for this test, the New Zealand-based company is marketing their $100,000 jetpack as personal transportation, with special appeal to military and rescue workers. The design goal is to fly for up to 30 minutes at top speeds of 63 miles per hour. And if the gas-powered, two-stroke piston engine conks out, there’s always the parachute.

We don’t generally give shout-outs to fellow bloggers, but in this case it’s deserved: Paul Spudis, who writes the “Once and Future Moon” blog on this site, recently won the National Space Society’s Space Pioneer Award for finding what may be a way out of the doldrums that currently afflict U.S. space policy. That isn’t what the award citation says. But that’s, in effect, what Spudis has done.

Through his blog (and book based on that blog), Spudis has become the top advocate for the idea that NASA should return to the moon—a course the agency started out on seven years ago, then abandoned. Reasonable people can (and do) argue over whether the moon should be our next destination in space. On any given day, I can be talked into sending astronauts to near-Earth asteroids or the Martian moon Phobos instead. But if our purpose is to establish a permanent human presence off the Earth, Spudis makes a compelling case that the moon, which is nearby and rich in resources, should be our next step.

One thing I like about the lunar “architecture” that he and co-author Tony Lavoie devised last year is that it starts modestly, with machines. Robots would set up the lunar outpost and scout resources before the humans arrive. This is what some NASA technologists originally envisioned back in 2004. But designing the astronauts’ vehicle and rockets quickly consumed all the agency’s attention and money, and plans for robotic scouts were scrapped.

Personally, I would bring them back. Not only are robots cheaper and safer than Apollo-style expeditions, they’re more likely than rockets to spin off benefits to the larger, non-space economy. Robots have had several high-profile jobs lately, from plugging underwater oil leaks to inspecting damaged nuclear reactors. If NASA can help advance the state of the art, so much the better for all of us. And sophisticated robots on the lunar surface, followed by humans, would pave the way for any space future you can imagine.

But let Spudis explain it himself, in this talk from last month’s International Space Development Conference: