My mother, who fortified herself for any aerial voyage with either Miltown or Chivas Regal, would later revisit with perverse relish each "air pocket" the plane had encountered. I'm not sure what she believed an air pocket consisted of, but I suppose it was something like the "region of low pressure causing an aircraft to lose altitude suddenly" that you still find if you Google the phrase today. You would not suppose that awareness of air pockets could much precede the Wrights, but in fact, the earliest reference I haveencountered is in a biography of the Roman general and statesman Titus Quinctius Flamininus, who in 197 B.C. liberated a number of Greek city-states from Macedonian control. Writing some 250 years after the event, the author, Plutarch, describes how a large gathering of Greeks gave out such a shout of joy at the announcement of their emancipation that passing crows fell from the sky.
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