The flight

The ability to fly has always fascinated man.Perhaps prehistoric man, faced with fierce, attacking beasts, longed to spring up and fly up into the sky like a bird! It is not surprising therefore, that ancient myths and legends are full of tales of fabulous beings that were able to fly. Greek mythology tells the story of Pegasus, a flying horse, and the messenger, god Hermes in his winged sandals, flying all over the world. Kites were perhaps the first the world’s aerial vehicles. The Chinese philosopher Mo Tzu, in the fifth century B.C., reportedly constructed a wooden kite that could fly, but it was wrecked
after one day’s tests.
In the 15th century, Leonardo Da Vinci’s deep interest in kites and their flight led him to draw many designs for flying machines. He also invented a parachute. Few people know that Wilbur and Orville Wright, the inventors of the aeroplane, were deeply interested in kite flying, and it was their years of kite flying and
observing kites that finally led to their invention of a flying machine. Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, used kites to learn more about the weather and he also contributed to aviation by developing a kite called a tetrahedral kite, that could lift a man.
The first man to approach flying on a scientific basis was Roger Bacon, an Englishman who lived in the thirteenth century. He believed that the air around us is like a sea, so a balloon could float on it, just as a boat does on water. His idea of a balloon or ‘airboat’ was probably the first basic and concrete idea of balloon
flight.
Balloons were used a lot in early aviation history. It all started in France in 1783 when two papermakers, Joseph and Etienne Montgolfier, noticed that after burning paper, smoke rose up the chimney and they wondered if they could apply that phenomenon to build a flying machine. After secret research and experimentation, they built the first balloon. Constructed of paper, fabric and glue, it was fueled by a very
smoky fire. Indeed, until their death,the Montgolfiers thought that smoke, rather than hot air, was the lifting force.

Orville Wright , Wilbur Wright

Wright Brothers Airplane

Their first balloon was made from paper and silk. A rooster, a duck and a sheep were chosen as the first passengers aloft, in order to test the effects of higher altitudes on living creatures. Though the rooster died of a
broken neck upon landing, the duck and the sheep survived their trip through the clouds!
The success of that flight led to the first manned flight in Paris on November 21, 1783 before a crowd of 400,000. That balloon was piloted on a 22 minute flight by two noblemen from the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.From the centre of Paris, they ascended 500 feet above the rooftops, before eventually landing miles away in the vineyards. Local farmers were very suspicious of this fiery dragon descending from the sky. The pilots offered champagne to placate them and to celebrate the first human flight.
Gliders were the immediate ancestors of the successful powered aeroplane. A glider is a ‘heavier-than-air’ machine without an engine. The glider uses air currents to sustain flight. Two Germans, Otto and Gustav Lilienthal, made the greatest contribution in this field. While still at high school in Germany, Otto built his first glider and he made the first successful glider flight in 1891.
The Wright brothers made the first successful powered flight on December 17, 1903 at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in the USA. Wilbur and Orville Wright were bicycle manufacturers who built and flew gliders as early as 1900. After extensive work on models, tested in wind tunnels, the Wright brothers designed and built their engine, a 4 cylinder model, which developed 12 horsepower.
They mounted this engine on to a reinforced glider and at Kitty Hawk, made four successful flights in one
day. The first flight lasted only 12 seconds, and the plane flew 100 feet, but  on the fourth flight, the plane covered 852 feet and remained in the air for 59 seconds! In 1908, the Wright brothers developed a military plane for the US army, and in 1909, they demonstrated that a plane was capable of carrying a passenger. It
flew at 40 miles an hour!
Mankind was now able to fly. During the 20th century,tecnology advanced greatly. Many new aeroplanes and engines were developed to transport people, luggage, cargo, military personnel, medical supplies and weapons.
The Concorde aeroplane, developed in the 1970’s in Britain was a supersonic passenger aircraft with a top speed of 2316 kilometres per hour, which is roughly twice as fast as the speed of sound. These planes travelled from London to New York in only three hours, and created a sonic boom in the sky when they
flew!
Concorde aircraft have now been scrapped due to their age and expensive upkeep, but they remain etched in public memory for their speed and graceful appearance. Subscribe to Child Project Helper by Email