The history of flight includes countless tales of heroic achievement, selfless courage and personal sacrifice. But, incredibly, it is not a long history. Though many have tried and failed, German inventor Otto Lilienthal deserves the honour of being first to fly, constructing a procession of gliders and making thousands of flights during the 1890’s until his death in 1896.
In the winter of 1903, on a wind-swept beach just south of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first sustained, controlled, powered flight which lasted all of 12 seconds and covered a distance of 120 feet, however a later flight that day netted a flight time of 59 seconds and a distance of 852 feet.
Just 15 years later, (1918), Manfred von Richthofen, (the Red Baron) flying his German Fokker Dr.1 Tri-plane, was shot down while in hot pursuit of a British fighter across the skies of France. While the Fokker was a dangerous adversary, its design was, in large part, copied from the British Sopwith Tri-plane, one of which had crashed in Germany. The Sopwith factory went on to build one of the best (but dangerous to fly) fighters of the Great War, the Sopwith Camel. Though less skilled pilots often crashed due to the plane’s tendency to fall into a fatal spin, seasoned pilots loved its manoeuvrability.
Scarcely a decade later Charles Lindberg’s 1927 solo flight from New York to Paris made headlines around the world — and made “Lucky Lindy” a national hero, and his plane, the “Spirit of St. Louis” a venerated piece of aviation history.
World War II brought an avalanche of development to aircraft design. Fighters like the British Supermarine Spitfire, with its all-metal construction, powerful Rolls Royce Merlin engine and formidable armament, made the wood and cloth planes of World War I seem quaint in comparison.
The development of North American Aviation’s P-51 Mustang for the British RAF, when combined with the superlative Rolls Royce Merlin supercharged engine, resulted in a fighter unmatched during the war.
