The history of flight is so interesting. Did you know that early flights were mostly postal runs? The mortality rate was something absurd. You pretty much got into the profession because you loved being a bird more than being alive.<p>One of the earliest telemetry systems was a beacon where you can only tell how far away you are from it. Like, you know you're X miles away, and you can see X increase or decrease. But you had no indication what direction it was in, or any of the miracles we take for granted today. So they would set up a path of these beacons, and you would fly from one to the next, and that's how you'd know where you were going. I want to say "at night", but honestly I am probably misremembering some of the fascinating details. But the point was, you were often navigating using primitive instruments that gave you very little data about how not to die within the next N minutes.<p>From the title, I thought the plane had accidentally landed with the gear up. But no, a master warning kicked in and the worst that happened was... they pulled up and went around. Woo.<p>but it really <i>is</i> woo. It's so fucking cool that humanity as a whole went from no flight to safe flight in <i>one</i> human lifespan. One old guy's worth of life! Modern civilization is only a few thousand generations old, and we're going from ground to air to air-but-safe in the blink of a slice of a microsecond of human evolution, relatively speaking.<p>I wish I'll be around to see it happen for space travel. SpaceX is coming tantalizingly close, yet space-but-safe is a different matter entirely. I think it will take a few generations for us to work out those problems.