It is a special honour and privilege to be asked to give the Wilbur and Orville Wright Lecture this year. My good friend, John Seekings, has reminded me that 1972 marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Around the World in 80 Days. That celebrated voyage by Phineas Fogg is particularly appropriate to our contemporary world of air transport. Many of the problems he faced are still with us—and we will probably have them 100 years from now.

It was also just about a 100 years ago that the Russian scientist, Mendeleyev, described the skies as “air oceans”. That description seems particularly apt today. And it is the basis for my thesis that we are now adrift on the “air ocean”. We are adrift because we have the technical means to tie the world together aeronautically but we cannot seem to agree on a heading to follow.

Technology has compressed a trip around the world from the 80 days of Phineas Fogg to a matter of hours. When we consider that it has only been 45 years since Lindbergh's historic flight across the Atlantic, the advances of technology seem even more staggering. But, while we have performed some technological miracles, we have also engendered some of the most difficult and complex problems since man rolled the first wheel downhill.