By Alan Smith

Ever since the industrial revolution we have found ways to race every machine of motion that we have built.  We raced steam locomotives on the main line, and steamboats on the nation’s rivers. We raced bicycles, scooters, ice skates and roller skates. We race anything that can move. It wouldn’t be surprising if we raced elevators in new office towers.

Yes, the human is a very competitive animal. It was natural that, a little less than six years after Ohio bicycle builders Wilbur and Orville Wright made the world’s first powered airplane flight on December 17, 1903 that competition between  pioneer pilots and their aircraft would begin, and begin it did in France in August 1909.