Posted on 18-12-2003

A hundred years of flight

Exactly a century after the Wright brothers' history making take-off, we cruise through the web for the best high-altitude links

Tim Ashby
Wednesday December 17, 2003

1. It was 100 years ago today, in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, that the Wright brothers' eponymous Flyer took off for the first time - marking the start of powered flight - if only for 12 seconds.
2. Yesterday President Bush was racking up his air-miles with a flying visit to the dunes of Kill Devil Hills to watch a short re-enactment of the original flight, make a quick speech and nip back to Washington in his state-of-the-art aircraft in time for tea.

3. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic (a mere seven hours away thanks to the Wright Flyer's descendants), the British government, with eerily apt timing, was unveiling its aviation white paper, outlining the proposed future of Britain's airports.

4. Aviation enthusiasts in the UK and USA will continue celebrating the centenary over the weekend.

5. The Wright brothers were not the first magnificent men with flying machines. In fact, some aviation historians would argue that it was Sir George Cayley, 50 years earlier, who sowed the first seeds of today's jet-setting world. In 1899 another British inventor, Percy Pilcher, did almost beat the Wright brothers to the skies.

6. Leonardo da Vinci dreamt of flying and according to myth Icarus died trying. Yet nowadays millions of people take flying for granted - with statistics suggesting that an average person could take 8 million flights before having an accident, compared with a one in 13 million chance of winning the lottery.

7. The aeroplane was the "definitive invention of the 20th century ... it reshaped the course of human history", according to Tom Crouch, senior curator of aeronautics at the Simthsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC.

8. Television cameras were present to capture the final landings of the 20th century's most famous aircraft, Concorde. Only one photograph exists from December 17 1903 at Kitty Hawk.

9. A US poll of journalists and readers in 1999 found that the invention of the aeroplane ranked number four among the top events of the 20th century. But the first three events, the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, the moon landing, and the bombing of Pearl Harbor, would all have been impossible without aviation.

10. And so as we wave goodbye to the first century of flight and welcome in the second, experts are predicting low-cost space flights as soon as 2015. It seems as though today's buyers of two $20m tickets to space may have rushed in a little too eagerly.