SFX: Sound of a Spitfire taking off 

NARRATOR: Charles Howard painted this image in 1942 for the Alameda Naval Air Station. Howard’s vision of flight resonates with veteran pilot John Suckow.   

JOHN SUCKOW: My name is John Suckow. I was a Navy pilot in the Vietnam era. I flew A4s and A6s.   This looks very reminiscent of a stylized Spitfire. It’s got the tapered wings, the empennage back, power plan forward.  

SFX: Music 

SUCKOW: That colorful piece in the center looks like the chord of a wing, chord meaning a slice through the center of it. And it also, with the different colors, looks like a representation of where the pressure points on the wing would be, caused by the lift and low pressure at the top of the wing, which gives you the lift and allows you to fly.  

The lines going up and over the wing and going underneath the wing are a good representation of what’s called laminar air flow. On the top they go up, they’re disrupted by the shape of the wing, so they go up and that gives you a lower pressure on top of the wing.   

And then when you look at the background, that’s kind of reminiscent of the hills around here.  

SFX: Plane flies L-R 

Now, the funnest thing that you can do with an airplane is, on a day when you know that nobody’s around, you could go flying through the valleys and up the mountains of the clouds.  

SFX: Plane flies R-L 

That is the most incredible feeling.