Airbus Lands in Mobile

摘要

Natives of mobile, alabama, can tell you the town's old slogan: "A City of Perpetual Potential." In the latter decades of the 20th century, the words sometimes seemed to carry a ring of disappointment. It's an old phrase, dating back to when Mobile was a booming Gulf Coast port city. But examine the history of Mobile's storied Brookley Air Field-its 9,600-foot runway leading straight to the 31-mile-long, 11-mile-wide Mobile Bay and its five estuaries-and you'll discover the city was also the birthplace of aviation inventors and dreamers. O.E. Williams, a pilot who invented the first reliable airspeed indicator around 1913, moved to Mobile and started an aviation school. He sold aircraft engines to the U.S. government before perishing in an airplane crash in 1917.