- Flight has long held a fascination for
people - and as long as the sky is there, the chances are man will attempt
to travel by air.
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- The bid by balloonists Brian Jones and
Bertrand Piccard to travel round the world is being hailed as the culmination
of years of aeronautical experiments.
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- So what other attempts have there been
to leave the earth behind and become air-borne? And what attempts may we
see in the future?
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- As early as the mid-1500s, the ancient
Chinese invented a hand-held toy that rose upward when spun round rapidly.
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- But it is Italian artist and inventor
Leonardo Da Vinci who is credited with designing the first prototype for
a helicopter.
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- His design, however, was only ever a
theory and would have been impractical full-size.
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- For several hundred years, inventors
dreamed up improvements on his idea, but they failed to design an adequate
engine.
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- At the end of the 19th century, the invention
of the internal combustion engine enabled pioneers to develop full-sized
models with an adequate power source for what would later become the helicopter.
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- The world's earliest airship took off
in 1852. Henri Giffard flew 27 kilometres (17 miles) from Paris to Trappes
in France in a steam-powered coal-gas airship.
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- Plane sailing
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- But the world's first sustained airplane
flight was famously achieved by Wilbur and Orville Wright in 1903. The
brothers, from Ohio, USA, first made history a year earlier, when they
built a glider which travelled a record 620 feet.
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- After more months of experimenting in
the back room of their bicycle shop, they built a four-cylinder, 12-horsepower
engine to power their Flyer.
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- On December 17, 1903, Wilbur tried to
fly the machine first but stalled it on take-off. The brothers then flipped
a coin to determine who would pilot the machine next. Orville won the toss.
At 10.35am, he made the first heavier-than-air, machine-powered flight
in history. It lasted only 12 seconds and covered just 120 feet, but it
was an historic moment.
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- Work continued by those inventors experimenting
with vertical lift. On November 13, 1907, Frenchman Paul Cornu lifted a
twin-rotored helicopter into the air without assistance - for a few seconds.
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- As refinements to the Wright brothers'
invention speeded up, man felt he was air-borne for good. World War I provided
man with more chance to try out a variety of machines.
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- In 1919, two Britons achieved the first
non-stop trans-Atlantic flight. Pilot John Alcock and navigator Arthur
Whitton Brown flew a Vickers Vimy, named after a battle in World War I.
They claimed the £10,000 prize for the first direct trans-Atlantic
flight, set up by the Daily Mail.
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- Six years later, French pioneer, Etienne
Oehmichen, became the first to fly a helicopter properly, covering one
kilometer in a closed circuit. It was a historic flight, taking seven minutes
and 40 seconds.
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- As the science of flight progressed,
it suffered a serious setback with the Hindenburg tragedy in 1937. The
German airship - larger than any other - was billed as a luxurious flying
hotel, faster than any ship.
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- It exploded in New Jersey, USA, turning
into a giant ball of fire and killing 35 of the 117 people on board. Many
theories were investigated but the cause of the disaster was never unequivocally
identified.
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- Records in the air
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- But man's love of the air could not be
suppressed for long - and innovations in the air are continuing to this
day.
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- The longest non-stop flight by a commercial
airliner was 18,545km (10,007 nautical miles) from Auckland, New Zealand,
to Paris, in 21 hours 46 minutes in June 1993, set by the Airbus Industrie
A340-200.
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- The fastest jet on earth is the US Airforce
Lockheed SE-71A. In 1976, a Lockheed achieved a speed of 3,529.56km/h (2,193.17mph).
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- Pilots Robert Timm and John Cook set
the duration record when, in 1959, they landed in Nevada, USA, after a
flight lasting 64 days and 22 hours and 19 minutes. They covered a distance
equivalent to six times round the world and were refuelled without landings.
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- Hilda Wallace of British Colombia, Canada,
became the oldest person to qualify as a pilot when she was awarded a licence
in March 1989, aged 80 years and 109 days.
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- The world record for endurance in a balloon
was set by Andy Elson and Bertrand Piccard, in the Breitling Orbiter II,
in January 1998. They travelled for nine days and 17 hours but their feat
was blocked when they were barred from flying over China.
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- American balloonist Steve Fosset set
a world balloon distance record - 22,975 kilometres - in August, 1998 as
he made the first balloon crossing of the South Atlantic and Indian oceans.
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- The air challenges that lie ahead for
man include:
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- Crossing the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans
by glider
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- Travelling round the world non-stop in
a microlight without refuelling
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- Flying pole-to-pole by balloon
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- Hang-gliding from John O'Groats to Land's
End
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- Paragliding across the English Channel
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- These ideas may be pie-in-the-sky, but
Barry Rolfe, secretary of the Royal Aeronautical Club, says circumnavigating
the world by balloon is by no means the final aeronautical challenge left.
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- He said: "Most of the world's challenges
have already been done by powered flights, so now records for those are
set measuring speed and time, which could go on for ever.
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- "But in man-powered flights, there's
an awful lot of things undone, because they've always seemed impossible.
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- "But who knows what may become possible
in future?
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- "Someone somewhere is probably planning
these sort of daredevil feats. I think it's a peculiarly British trait
- to have a cool exterior but to come up with wild innovations."
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