Yes indeed and too young to live through that amazing era of aeronautics, starting with Kelly Johnson's Shooting Star (I think I read in his bio that he was literally standing in the cockpit, canopy off, during tests), when people using slide rules pushed things like the SR-71 [1] from paper to 80,000 ft in 3 years, and everything was being "discovered" by incredibly creative trial and error. Or the insane USAF pilots taking Thunderchiefs dive-bombing (itself a controversial design certainly not made for THAT) over Vietnam with a 50% survival rate over 100 missions. Or, well, anything to do with the B-58. Yet it was that era that got me to study engineering in the first place and I wasn't alone.

As with [0] I actually sailed in Sydney Harbour in 2012 with a chap who flew Sea Furies into Korea (!!!) - maybe from the same carrier? He was ancient and I never learnt his name, but he was quite a character. Got shot down over water and swam to safety, apparently. As ever those stories were told second hand, as that generation doesn't like showing off.

Today's CAD-designed aircrafts (CAS apart) don't really fly, they just deliver an electronics package somewhere in the general vicinity of the combat zone and hang around until the computer decides what to destroy and gets on with it. And many of them don't even have a pilot anymore... still amazing technology, but not quite the same spirit. Certainly not when they also become covert welfare programs to buy votes in 49 states and international favours in 8 nations. Kelly Johnson claimed he could deliver Oxcarts for $3m per unit...

Those of my friends who stayed in the industry are now building rockets. In some ways, today's space race is yesterday's air - the rules aren't set, the market doesn't exist, and the politicians haven't done a land grab yet.

[1] And as was his habit:

> In 1968, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara canceled the F-12 interceptor program; the specialized tooling used to manufacture both the YF-12 and the SR-71 was also ordered destroyed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird#SR-71