I didn't fly until I was about 17, but in the last few years, I've made upwards of 70 flights a year. Daniel made his first flight at about 15 months, and Victoria hers before she was born. My mother never flew at all.

In the 100 years since Kill Devil Hill, just look at how far the technology has gone. Orville and Wilbur made four flights that 17th of December. The first one was a hundred feet or so in length, and lasted for a few seconds only, yet that flight could have taken place entirely inside the fuselage of a B747-400. Now we can fly half-way round the world non-stop, and until recently, could cross the Atlantic faster than the sun. We can buy food grown the other side of the world the day after it's picked. That's pretty much as quick as our grandparents could get Cornish-grown broccoli to London.

Travelling by plane is no longer the great adventure that it used to be -- the adventure now starts when you get there. Flying is now so reliable it's just plain boring, even if we still have that overall disbelief about how the planes work.

It's not the white-knuckle ride with the frisson of fear that it was in the 1930s. It's no longer the horribly noisy, vibrating and rather smelly affair that it was when planes still has piston engines. We take the technology so much for granted that we bitch about the food, we complain about the seats, and are annoyed when we can't get power for our laptops or the headphones don't work.

We don't think about how the pilot sees where he's going when we are in cloud, or indeed whether the thing will actually deliver us in one piece to the destination. We just know that it will. Might be a bit late, though. Bit like riding a bus, or a train now.

But even after that, we still look upwards to watch planes pass overhead and wonder again at just how do those things stay up there in the air. Even though the plane is now just another of mankind's many inventions, it's still one of the few that turns heads. Only last month thousands of people went down to Heathrow to watch the last Concorde landing in commercial service. 100 years old? Still a wonder to us all.

Daniel Koffler is a Contributing Editor to DominoPower. Daniel is a R6 CLP and works as an IT consultant for major organizations in North America and Europe, specializing in network design, security analysis and knowledge management, he is also the author of several OpenSource projects. Daniel can be reached at dkoffler@users.sourceforge.net.