The desire to fly has been present in humankind since ancient times. As early as 300 BC, the Chinese invented the kite, developing techniques to make it fly in the air and recording human attempts of flying with them.
Later, around 400 BC, a scholar of ancient Greece, Archites of Taranto, built a wooden artifact which he named “Peristera” (dove, in Greek). The bird-shaped apparatus, tied to ropes that allowed a controlled flight, was propelled by an air blast.
However, the credit for the first human flight, rests on the Andalusian Berber Abbas Ibn Firnas, born in Ronda (Malaga, Spain), who is said to have jumped from a high place in Cordoba in 875 with wooden wings covered with silk and feathers. Apparently, he flew for about 10 seconds before falling and breaking both legs. This flight served as an inspiration to Elmer de Malmesbury, a Benedictine monk who, a century later (about 1010) traveled more than 200 meters in the air on a similar apparatus. Both missed the fact that for a successful landing a bird-like tail was needed.
For centuries the flight of birds continued to inspire pioneering inventors, being Leonardo da Vinci the most famous. His “ornithopter” never came to be built, but da Vinci understood that human muscles were too weak to move wings and a greater propelling force was necessary.
Up to the nineteenth century, there were numerous attempts to build flying machines which gradually evolved into the first aircraft capable of controlled flights and from which many improvements were made to get to present-day aircrafts, with near 100% safety and a great energy efficiency.
Some inventors, such as the German Otto Lilienthal, focused only on planning, controlling the direction with the body. Others, such as Augustus Herring, William Samuel Henson, Samuel Langley, Hiram Maxim or Clément Ader, tried to advance in propulsion, but the heavy steam engines of the time were not adequate. The British George Cayley, considered the father of aerodynamics, stood out for his scientific study of flight, defining the concept of the aircraft as it is understood today: a fixed-wing apparatus with separate systems of lifting, propulsion and control.
875 – Abbas Ibn Firnas (Malaga, Spain) jumps from a high place with wooden wings covered in silk and feathers.
1010 – Elmer de Malmesbury travels 200 meters with a device like that of Abbas Ibn Firnas.
1783 – The Montgolfier brothers create the hot air balloon.
1785 – Jean Pierre Blanchard and John Jeffries ride in a balloon across the Channel for the first time in history.
1843 – William Henson registers the first patent for an aircraft equipped with engines, propellers, and provided with a fixed wing.
1852 – Henri Giffard makes the first controlled flight of an airship.
1890 – Clement Ader travels 50 meters with his plane Éole, the first aircraft that shares most of its characteristics with current ones.
1903 – The Wright brothers perform the first controlled flight of an airplane.
1906 – Santos Dumont manages to take off without the help of external elements.
1909 – Louis Bleriot, first person to cross the Channel with his monoplane Blériot XI in a 37-minute flight. DELAG company was founded, the first airline in mail and passenger transport.
1914 – Tony Jannus (USA) performs the first commercial flight in history, from St. Petersburg to Tampa (Florida).
1919 – KLM, the oldest airline still active, is founded.
1927 – Charles Lindbergh completes the first solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean, from New York to Paris.
1928 – Juan de la Cierva crosses the English Channel in his autogiro, invented in 1923.
1927 – The Spanish airline Iberia is born.
1932 – Amelia Earhart completes a nonstop transatlantic flight, thus becoming the first woman to accomplish this feat.
1938 – The German airline Lufthansa makes the first passenger flight across the Atlantic.
1944 – The Messerschmitt, first jet fighter aircraft, enters service with the German Luftwaffe.
1947 – Charles Yeager becomes the first person to overtake the speed of sound, at the controls of a Bell X-1, the Glamorous Glennis.
1952 – The first passenger jet aircraft, the British-built De Havilland Comet, begins operations.
1962 – The North American X-15 rocket plane becomes the first aircraft to reach the thermosphere.
1968 – The world’s first commercial supersonic aircraft, the Soviet Tupolev Tu-144, conducts its first flight.
1969 – The supersonic Concorde carries out its first flight.
1976 – The Concorde performs its first passenger flight.
1977 – The Tupolev TU-44 operates its first passenger flight.
1986 – The Rutan Voyager successfully completes the first round-the-world flight without stopping nor refueling.
1999 – The Breitling Orbiter 3 globe flies around the world without stopping, in 19 days and almost 22 hours.
2001 – The unmanned plane, RQ-4 Global Hawk, flies nonstop and no refueling from California to Australia.
2005 – The largest passenger aircraft to date, the Airbus 380, conducts its first test flight.
2007 – The A380 operates its first commercial flight, for Singapore Airlines.
2008 – Swiss pilot Yves Rossy crosses the English Channel with a rigid wing on his back propelled by 4 micro turbines. The flight from Dover to Calais took ten minutes.
2009 – Boeing performs its first B787 flight and becomes the first plane made from composite materials.
2014 – Boeing tests the first hybrid aircraft capable of in-flight battery recharging.
2016 – The aircraft Solar Impulse 2 completes the first round-the-world flight of a device powered by solar energy.
There is a great controversy regarding the realization of the first flight, with two conflicting opinions: those who consider the Wright brothers as the authors of this feat, and those who go for the Brazilian Alberto Santos Dumont. The latter flew to Paris on his 14-bis, the first flight of an aircraft in the history of world aviation achieved without external artifices help and that was recorded and published.
On the other hand, the Wright brothers used rails and catapults in their take-off tests and did not make many flights in public to avoid information theft while still perfecting their device well enough to obtain a patent. Hence, their flights had few witnesses unlike those of Santos Dumont, who put all his inventions in public domain.
However, other aviators made their contributions to global aviation long before Dumont or the Wright brothers. Therefore, such recognition should not be given to any aviator. It would be correct to say that both achieved this feat by building on to the advances of other pioneers who, although less successful, had already tried to fly in aircraft heavier than air, trying to tackle flight problems before the necessary technology was available.
Thus, the first recorded human flight was made in Paris on October 15, 1783, in a balloon held in the air by cables attached to the ground.
Two months later, Dr Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and the noble F. Laurent D’Arlandes performed the first free flight in a man-made machine, getting to cover 8km at 26 meters in a hot air balloon invented by the Montgolfier brothers. The flight, which lasted 25 minutes, had its greatest drawback in the lack of control of the aircraft, which flew where the wind took it. Nevertheless, the Montgolfier brothers’ experiment spread throughout Europe, thus promoting a more thorough knowledge of the altitude-atmosphere relationship.
Other inventors include Jacques Charles who replaced hot air with hydrogen; Henri Gifford who invented the airship by controlling its direction with rudders and engines; o William Henson who, in 1843, registered the first patent for an aircraft equipped with engines, propellers, and provided with a fixed wing, what is now known as an airplane.
However, it is widely believed that the first flight in an aircraft heavier than air was made by Orville Wright on the so-called Flyer, on 17 December 1903 at Kitty Hawk (North Carolina). The great success of the Wright brothers was to solve the problem of control. Although they incorporated a gasoline engine, they decided that propulsion was a secondary objective and prioritized the aircraft to be pilotable. During their tests they saw the need to control movement in the three axes of space: longitudinal to the apparatus (roll), wing (pitch) and vertical (yaw). Although the first practical aircraft would use different systems than those adopted by the Wright, their innovations solved the problem of a tripulated flight.
The success of the Wright brothers accelerated the application of improvements to designs, leading to new milestones.
In 1909, Louis Blériot crossed the English Channel from Calais to Dover, and in 1914 the first regular line from St. Petersburg to Tampa (Florida) was briefly inaugurated on a Benoist XIV biplane seaplane, whose only passenger was sitting next to the pilot in an open cockpit. The First World War prompted the definitive take-off of aviation and, at its end, in 1919, the oldest surviving airline, the Dutch KLM, was founded.
In 1927, Charles Lindbergh completed his famous solo transatlantic flight from New York to Paris and the following year, the Spaniard Juan de la Cierva crossed the English Channel in his “autogiro”, an innovative concept that failed.
In the 1930s, the fledgling airlines began operating intercontinental flights, with an endless list of stopovers.
In 1938, the German airline Lufthansa was the first to cross the Atlantic Ocean with a passenger airplane and no stopovers.
In Spain, as early as 1793, it is known that in La Coruña del Conde (Burgos), the inventor Diego Marín Aguilera completed a 360 meters flight with an artifact made of iron and bird feathers, controlled by him. It reached approximately 6 meters above the starting point until it landed on the other side of the river. The breakage of one of the bolts that moved the wings caused the fast landing. Next morning, when the neighbors heard about what happened, they mocked Marín, thinking him crazy, and set the device on fire.
However, it was not until the early twentieth century that aviation as we know it today, began to take shape in our country.
In 1902, the Spanish engineer Leonardo Torres Quevedo developed a type of airship that solved the suspension problem of the nacell. It included an inner frame of flexible cables that gave the aircraft great rigidity because of internal pressure, combining the properties of rigid and flexible machines. Three years later, together with Alfredo Kindelán (considered the founder of the current Air Force), Torres Quevedo built the first Spanish airship, called España. As a result, the collaboration between Torres Quevedo and the French company Astra began and, in 1911, production of airships known as Astra-Torres started. Some examples were acquired by the French and English armies from 1913 and used during the First World War in very different tasks, mainly protection and naval inspection.
In 1918, Torres Quevedo, in collaboration with the engineer Emilio Herrera Linares, designed a transatlantic aircraft that was called Hispania. From Spain, they wished to be the first to cross the Atlantic Ocean. But, due to funding problems, the project was delayed, and it was the British John William Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown who achieved this feat in 1919, flying from Newfoundland to Ireland on a World War I bomber.
In the first decade of 1900, after the flight of the Wright brothers, the excitement for airplanes reached Spain. Both Herrera and Kindelan, military men and balloon and airship pilots, became devotees of these machines and urged their superiors to purchase aircrafts in the neighboring country. The visit of King Alfonso XIII to the Wright school in Pau strengthened the military interest. From that moment on, the monarch would show great concern in the evolution of aviation, linking the monarchy to the achievements accomplished in our country by this aeronautical discipline. With this background, we can affirm that the history of Spanish aviation began in two very different ways: military, through the engineers who established their test center in Cuatro Vientos; and the civil economy, through enthusiasts who used their own money or other’s patronage to buy an airplane.
However, it was not until 1909, when Louis Bleriot crossed the English Channel and the aeronautical meeting in Reims and the first Paris Air Show took place, that aviation had an effective impact on the Spaniards. In fact, the first airplane built by a Spaniard (a woman’s fashion designer called Antonio Fernández) was presented in the French capital and acquired by a French builder who used it in an aviation school.
Furthermore, the first flight of a Spanish aircraft took place on 5 September of the same year, in the town of Paterna (Valencia), where the industrial engineer Gaspar Brunet put in the hands of the pilot Joan Oliver a biplane with which he made a short flight. Thus began a new industry that would bring hundreds of aircraft to the flourishing world of aviation.
Although these aircrafts were originally used for mail transport, during the 1920- and 1930-decades commercial passenger aviation began to take off in Spain. Emblematic airlines such as Iberia (founded in 1927 and still active) were founded, establishing national and international routes and connecting Spain with the world.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Spanish aviation took a great leap forward with the incorporation of jet aircrafts. The mythical “Fighter of the Century”, F-4 Phantom II, became the emblem of the Spanish Air Force.
At the same time, commercial aviation also experienced a revolution in Spain. The addition of wide-body aircraft such as the Boeing 747, DC-10 and Airbus A300 increased passenger capacity, catapulting our country into a new era in global aviation.
The most common belief to this question is that it was the Wright brothers. But what these historical figures really did in 1903, was to complete the first manned flight. However, there is also a dispute over this as, depending on the source consulted, this feat is attributed to the Brazilian aviator, Santos Dumont, who in 1906 made the first flight filmed in the presence of the international federation of aviation, unlike their competitors who did so without witnesses or evidence.
What it is true is that Leonardo da Vinci was one of the first to develop the sketch of a ship that could be kept suspended in the air. It would inspire most of the inventors dedicated to the art of flying.
In the mid-nineteenth century, in 1842, the Englishman William Samuel Henson, patented the first prototype of what we know today as an airplane. This draft, which was a revolution at that time, was equipped with a fixed wing, propellers and a steam engine. Less than a decade later, his friend John Stringfellow recreated a small plane capable of «floating» for three seconds.
However, the inventor of the aircraft is the French engineer Clement Ader who in 1890 flew 50 meters with his plane “Éole”. Although it crashed before travelling 100 meters, this was the first aircraft that shares most characteristics with those flying the sky today.
Likewise, in August 1901, the German physicist and inventor Gustave Whitehead would have performed, with the 21st of its prototypes, the first manned motor propelled flight. Even some witnesses confirm a previous flight was already performed around 1899. None of his successes were recorded or patented.
As we see, putting an exact date to the invention of the first airplane is complicated because we come across many inventors. The fact is that, since the first sketches of Leonardo da Vinci, they all had the antecedents of various aircraft prototypes.
In the 1930s, England and Germany established the basis for a new propulsion. The British Frank Whittle patented a jet turbine design in 1930 and, at the end of the decade, built an engine that could be used for the purpose. At the same time, the German Hans von Ohain patented his own version of the jet engine in 1936 and developed a similar machine. Neither knew the work of the other, so both are the inventors of this thruster.
At the end of World War II, Germany was using the first jet aircraft and producing the first jet fighter in history, the Messerschmitt Me 262.
The first commercial jet aircraft in aviation history was the British-built de Havilland Comet. This aircraft began to operate for passenger transport in 1952, with a speed of 850 km/h and a relatively quiet pressurised cabin.
During the Second World War, some airmen managed to pass the sound barrier, but with catastrophic results: strong shock waves generated by the high speed destroyed the aircraft as it had not been designed to reach such speeds.
Already in 1947, US engineers went on to work on small prototype drones. The good results obtained in these tests would lead to the production of a series of aircraft called X-planes (X-planes). The American Charles Yeager became the first person to exceed the speed of sound, on October 4, 1947, piloting a Bell X-1 named Glamorous Glennis.
In 1962, the North American X-15 rocket plane became the first aircraft to reach the thermosphere, piloted by the American Robert White. He managed to stay at an altitude of 95,936 metres for 16 seconds, covering approximately 80 kilometres in that time. Subsequently, the X-15 would reach 107 960 metres in altitude, and became the first hypersonic aircraft (5 times the speed of sound), breaking several records of speed, and surpassing Mach 6 (six times the speed of sound) on different flights.
The world’s first commercial supersonic aircraft was the Soviet Tupolev Tu-144, which performed its first flight on 31 December 1968. Its first passenger flights would not be until 1977, but due to operational problems, it ceased to be used for this purpose the following year.
The Concorde, manufactured by a Franco-British consortium, made its first flight in early 1969, two months after the Russian Tupolev. However, it was the first to start operating on a commercial basis. It carried out its first passenger flight in 1976 and kept flying transatlantic routes until 2003 when it was retired from service because of its low profitability.
Both have been the only commercial supersonic aircraft developed, so far.
Since the first commercial reactor, the De Havilland Comet, in 1952, aircrafts improvements in terms of safety, controls and many other technical aspects have been countless what have made possible a high reliability rate in each operation. With climate change, efforts are now focused primarily on reducing the environmental footprint.
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