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400 BCE
china
Around 400 BC - China
The discovery of the kite that could fly in the air by the Chinese started humans thinking about flying. Kites were used by the Chinese in religious ceremonies. They built many colorful kites for fun, also. More sophisticated kites were used to test weather conditions. Kites have been important to the invention of flight as they were the forerunner to balloons and gliders. -
1480
leonardo da vinci
Leonardo da Vinci made the first real studies of flight in the 1480's. He had over 100 drawings that illustrated his theories on flight. The Ornithopter flying machine was never actually created. It was a design that Leonardo da Vinci created to show how man could fly. The modern day helicopter is based on this concept. -
Langley's Aerodrome
Samuel Langley was an astronomer, who realized that power was needed to help man fly. He built a model of a plane, which he called an aerodrome, that included a steam-powered engine. In 1891, his model flew for 3/4s of a mile before running out of fuel.
Langley received a $50,000 grant to build a full sized aerodrome. It was too heavy to fly and it crashed. He was very disappointed. He gave up trying to fly. -
One of Lilienthal's Gliders
German engineer, Otto Lilienthal, studied aerodynamics and worked to design a glider that would fly. He was the first person to design a glider that could fly a person and was able to fly long distances.
He was fascinated by the idea of flight. Based on his studies of birds and how they fly, he wrote a book on aerodynamics that was published in 1889 and this text was used by the Wright Brothers as the basis for their designs. -
Write Brothers
Your te On December 17, 1903, the Wright brothers made the first successful experiment in which a machine (aka airplane) carrying a man rose by its own power, flew naturally and at even speed, and descended without damage. -
Frank Whittle
The "turbojet", was invented in the 1930s, independently by Frank Whittle and later Hans von Chain. The first turbojet aircraft to fly was the Heinkel He 178 V1 first prototype of the German Air Force, the Luftwaffe, on August 27, 1939 in Restock (Germany). -
the first commercial airplane
On Jan. 1, 1914, the St. Petersburg Tampa Air boat Line became the world's first scheduled passenger airline service, operating between St. Petersburg and Tampa, Fla. It was a short lived endeavor only four months but it paved the way for today's daily transcontinental flights.Jul 19, 2012 -
airplanes today facts
There are approximately 2 million passengers boarding these flights on a daily basis. The average 747 airplane has between 150 and 175 miles of electrical wiring running through it. The largest cargo airplane today is the Anton An 225 cargo jet. It has six engines and is capable of carrying 559,577 pounds.
