We tend to take our history for granted. Case in point: the aircraft you are in right now. Canada has one of the world’s great aeronautic histories, and yet, how much about it do you really know? I ask because I’m in the same, um, boat as you are. That we can take such an awesome piece of machinery for granted says much about where we are as a civilization.

So I am going to guess that Canada’s 100th anniversary of flight will pass without much mention. But we should think about it – if only because of how much airplanes have changed our landscape. And us.

Imagine this: 100 years ago, there were no airports. That’s all I need to think about, and it’s what most impresses me. Because airports define a city’s landscape more than almost anything else, especially for travellers. For us, the airport often is the city, or as much of it as we’re going to see, and that surrounding landscape – often industrial, full of hotels, with warehouses and storage depots and a jumble of highways – is our first ground-level look at any place. Airworld is separate and modern, unlike train stations, since it is, by necessity, far removed from the city centre.

The birth of the airplane required a complete rethink of our geography – in a much more profound way than the car and the roads and the highways that surround us. Cars and roads created suburbs and edge cities. But the world only started to become “small” when air travel became commonplace. And if Thomas Friedman asserts the world is now “flat,” well, without air travel, the world would be nothing as we know it. If highways are the arteries of a country, then air routes are the arteries of the world.

Today’s aircraft are not that far removed from the ones that flew around (though not very far) 100 years ago. Alexander Graham Bell – the father of the first powered aircraft in Canada – would probably recognize today’s airplanes for what they are. He might be amazed by how fast they can go or how high or how far or how often they fly in a single day, but I’m sure that what would most surprise Bell is the infrastructure: the armies of people who work to get an aircraft aloft; the size of the terminals and the grounds that surround them; the activity generated by the airport.

For me, this is the most amazing aspect of air travel, and it makes me wonder what the future holds. What will our airports look like in 100 years? Will they be bigger? Or smaller? How big can airplanes get? What other mode of air travel awaits us? Air travel is a marvellous thing. It can still inspire awe. It should, I think – as much as it did 100 years ago.