A Letter from the Sky to the Sea — On Machines That Need No Pilot

I write these words from my modest quarters in Paris, where the autumn air still carries the memory of my flight above the Bagatelle. Weeks have passed since the 14-bis lifted itself from the earth before the eyes of honest witnesses, and yet I remain unsettled — not by doubt, but by a strange trembling of the soul that accompanies every great revelation. The sky opened itself to me, and I believed I was delivering a gift to mankind. Now a rumor reaches me, a dispatch so extraordinary that I hesitate to credit it, and yet so plausible in its horror that I cannot dismiss it. They say that in the distant future, machines shall fly without any pilot aboard — pilotless craft, if one can imagine such a thing — and that these devices shall be built not for the joy of crossing clouds, but for war. Worse still, they say a company has now extended this terrible ambition to the sea itself, manufacturing unmanned vessels designed to surveil, to intercept, to destroy. The sky and the ocean, those two infinite territories that belong to all peoples, colonized by instruments of death that answer to no human hand at the moment of decision. I think of Cabangu, where I was born among coffee trees and open horizons, where the birds taught me that flight was freedom. I think of Paris, generous Paris, which embraced a Brazilian dreamer and let him test his wings above her gardens. Neither Cabangu nor Paris whispered to me of such a future. I built my aeroplanes so that borders might dissolve, so that a man in São Paulo might feel as near to a man in Lyon as to his own neighbor. The sky, I believed, would render frontiers absurd. And yet here is the old sickness of our species: every instrument of liberation becomes, in time, an instrument of domination. I confess a melancholy that sits upon my chest like fog over the Seine. If pilotless machines shall wage war upon the waters and in the air, then who shall be accountable for the destruction they cause? A machine feels no remorse. A machine writes no letters home. I do not pretend to know the technical details of these future vessels. I am merely a man who flew. But I refuse, with all the conviction left in me, the notion that any nation may claim the sky or the sea as its private arsenal. These domains are the commons of humanity. Let us, for the love of what is decent, remember that.