You have never heard of Oswald Boelcke. Well, let me qualify that. You are extremely unlikely to have heard of Oswald Boelcke, unless you are an especially diligent student of the history of either (or both) of the First World War or the development of fighter aircraft tactics.
You may have heard of Manfred Von Richthofen, the immortal Red Baron - as lauded and feared by his comrades as his foes, even if he's possibly best known for being played in parody form by Ade Edmonson in Blackadder. Richthofen, as cold and ruthless a killing machine as has ever been born or bred, became emblematic first of German supremacy in the air over France, and eventually of the whole code and legend of fighter pilots.
Well, Boelcke was his tutor. Boelcke it was who survived those first, desperate years of air warfare over the mud-soaked Western Front, at a time when fighter planes were little more than powered kites, and barely adequately powered at that. Boelcke it was who scored the first 'kill' of another aircraft using Anthony Fokker's ground-breaking 'Eindecker' with its forward-facing machine guns synchronised to fire through the spinning propeller at the front.
Boelcke it was who was the first true fighter pilot. He even wrote it all down, listing the maxims that would go on to become part of aviation lore. Gain height, altitude and speed, keep the sun behind you, never fly straight and level in the combat zone. All of which would go on to inform fighter tactics and flying skills to this day.
Skills were all Boelcke and his comrades, and his enemies such as Britain's Mick Mannock or France's Roland Garros, had though. Their aircraft were barely worthy of the name. Even in the crucible of conflict, with the spurs of war driving on development and science, fighter planes such as the Sopwith Camel or Albatross were just insane contraptions of wood, wire and fabric. Only the most skilful survived, and even then it was a matter of luck. Boelcke himself was killed following a collision. He had racked up 40 'kills' and been awarded Germany's highest honour, the Pour La Merité medal, better known as the Blue Max. They even made a film about it. George Peppard was in it, yes, him out of The A-Team.
Why do I mention all of this? Because Boelcke was both the first and almost the last of his kind. He regarded aerial combat as chivalrous, honourable and skilful. Yet his tactics, his Dikta Boelcke as they were known, effectively paved the way for modern warfare, where the objective is to be victorious without necessarily being honourable. The aces that came later used improving aviation technology until we reached the point in the seventies where, thanks to missiles and long-range radar, one aircraft could shoot down another without ever even seeing it. Modern pilots, skilful and highly trained though they are, are essentially there to give the computer permission to do what it does best.
And I fear we are reaching a similar crossroads with cars. We are seeing an inexorable march towards automation in cars, to a point where the driver will be essentially redundant except to be the legal keeper of the microchips, there not to be skilful or talented but merely to be blamed if everything goes wrong.
M'colleague Mr Humphreys was right to praise such technology (in the September issue of the iPad Mag) in the sense that it will make the roads safer and our journeys more comfortable. Why not, after all, let the tech take over and drive the car for a while as you tweet and catch up on the morning paper iPad edition?
Why? I'll tell you why. Because we will lose something precious. We are already losing it. Cars are now lauded more for their electronics and infotainment systems than anything mechanical, firstly because they can be (technology has evolved to allow them to be) and secondly because it's what the customer wants. In a world of iPhones, iPads and iWatches, it's what we, the consumers, want. Lest our Twitter feeds fall silent.
But we are losing our cars in the process. Let me give you an example. I've been at this job since before ESC (Electronic Stability Control - referred to as ESP by some makers using the Bosch system) was standard issue and was taken, by late, lamented Saab, to an airfield track to demonstrate its new ESC setup, on the then-current 9-5. Speeding down a cone-lined runway, we were asked to trigger a series of violent avoiding manoeuvres, first with ESC switched off and then with it on. The results were predictable - ESC off, and we spun like a kid's Hot Wheel, smacked across a hardwood floor. ESC on and we sailed, unperturbed, through. But then the Saab engineers told us to turn the ESC off again and try, really hard, to do the test just with our hands and feet. And with a little bit of practice, we were able to do it - the car had the fundamental balance and grip to do the job. The ESC was really a safety net.
Now? I'm not so sure. I've just been driving a BMW i3 and it's an amazing piece of kit. So high tech that Captain Picard would feel right at home on board; parsimonious in its use of electricity taken from the grid and chemical energy from a tiny on-board motor/generator and fuel tank; and clever in its lightweight carbon-and-aluminium construction.
But it doesn't feel like a BMW to drive. Oh, it's close. Certainly as close as you could expect a first-generation electric car, running on skinny aero-friendly tyres, to manage. Still something is missing though - the electronics, the clever electronics, are taking over and the mechanical connection has been lost.
Without question, ESC and similar stability technologies are being used to paper over the cracks in chassis development these days. It's simple economics - dynamic testing and proper suspension engineers are expensive commodities, so if a few lines of code and some computer simulation can fill in the gaps at the extremes of performance, all well and good and a few million is saved. Everyone wins.
Except we don't. For all the thrall in which electronics hold us, we are not electronic creatures. We cannot feel or sense the movement of electrons, nor fathom the motions of the silicon chip. We are mechanical, tactile creatures and the farther and farther our cars drift from that fact, the less and less we will understand them until the point arrives when no-one cares any more and transport will simply be transport.
And that will be a terrible mistake. Because for all the electronic toppings, cars are mechanical devices. They are connected to the road not by static charge, but by the grip coefficient of their tyres and the flow of molecules of air across their surfaces. Electronics can predict, react and control much of that interaction, but not all of it. You can still crash a car with ESC and ABS fitted - the laws of physics, of mechanical physics, Newtonian physics, still trump the worlds of electrons and quantum.
There is a second aviation example to be followed, here. In the early part of the Vietnam War, the mighty US Air Force and US Navy Aviation were losing pilots and planes, hand over fist, to the less-well-equipped North Vietnamese fighter squadrons. Why? Because American doctrine had decided that pilots didn't need to be warriors any more, they just need to line up the computerised dots and let long-range missiles do the work. Vietnamese pilots either knew better or were simply left with no choice. Let the high-tech stuff fail and falter, as it inevitably would, and then close in and shoot down their opposition with old-fashioned dog-fighting and gunnery techniques. The Dikta Boelcke triumphed over the chip and radar beam.
Even the US military eventually recognised the fact, and formed a special school to once again train their pilots to fly like warriors, not technicians. It was called Top Gun and it's still turning out students today.
If we allow electronics to take over, sit back and let the supposedly inevitable happen, then the same fate will befall us. We will become de-skilled, de-motivated and dis-interested. And then where will we be when the technology decides not to work properly?