Today, fighter planes & drones have become more of instruments of “Aerial Combat” where the enemy remains unseen & the fight remains highly impersonal.

BHPian nivatakavacha recently shared this with other enthusiasts.

Prologue

Last week, I watched Avatar: The Way of Water in a theatre near me and it was in that film during a certain fight sequence that I knew that I had to write this article immediately. This theme had been at the back of my mind for a long-long time and being an expert at procrastination does not help. Anyways, after the film, I finally planted my firm bottom very firmly onto a seat like a leech and did the necessary research for writing this article. It was cathartic in many ways since I had to sift through many childhood memories and forge my way down the rabbit hole through endless Google hyperlinks. Hope you will like it.

I will come back to that particular film sequence later in the article.

Right from a young age, I have always been fascinated by the human achievement of mastering flight. What people dreamt about for centuries was made possible on December 17th, 1903 by the Wright Brothers. It was a relatively short flight of 12 seconds but paraphrasing the famous words of Neil Armstrong, it was a “Giant leap for humankind”.

So much has changed over the last 100 years and we now take air transport for granted; often not realizing the extent of technological changes over the years. Today air transport is often called the…