As we head into what our CEO Don Carty has publicly acknowledged will be "still another difficult week at American Airlines," let's not forget how often those in our industry have been told what they can't do ... and how wrong those nay-sayers have been.

Lord Kelvin, president of Royal Society and a brilliant scientist who developed the absolute scale of temperature which bears his name, proclaimed in 1895 that, simply put, "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible."

Perhaps Lord Kelvin can be forgiven, since we were still eight years away from Kitty Hawk, and who could have foreseen the World Wide Web in 1985? But let's go now to an editorial in The New York Times ("All the News That's Fit to Print") from December 10, 1903:

"We hope that Professor Langley [the subject of the story and a colleague of Alexander Graham Bell] will not put his substantial greatness as a scientist in further peril by continuing to waste his time and the money involved in further air experiments. Life is short, and he is capable of services to humanity incomparably greater than can be expected to result from trying to fly."

The scientific community and the press still weren't satisfied, the flying-machine claims of Wilbur and Orville Wright were derided and dismissed as a hoax by publications including Scientific American and the New York Herald, as well as the US Army and most American scientists for the better part of the next five years.

In spite of scores of public demonstrations, affidavits from local dignitaries, and photographs of themselves flying, the very idea of heavier-than-air flying machines was simply too ludicrous to believe.

As an industry facing what may seem like impossible odds, it's never a bad idea to look back and realize that the very existence of the aviation industry was based on overcoming impossible odds. And we'll do it again. — MD