Who discovered aeroplane

The pointy-nosed plane barreled down the French tarmac and into the air. The crowd of 200,000 spectators that gathered near the runway at Le Bourget Airport for the 1973 Paris Air Show watched the star of the day, the Concorde, climb toward the horizon. Its rival would not be so fortunate. The Soviet-built TU-144, like its British/French competitor, sought to usher in a new era of supersonic passenger travel. But the Soviet plane swerved suddenly during ascent and dropped like a stone onto the nearby village of Goussainville, where it killed six in the plane and eight on the ground. Though marred by tragedy, the air show of ’73 signaled that the supersonic era had arrived—and that the Concorde would be its vanguard. From 1976 to 2003, the Concorde shrank the Atlantic Ocean in half, ferrying passengers from New York to London or Paris in a just three and a half hours. The plane cruised higher than 50,000 feet, revealing the curvature of the Earth at a casual glance out the window. Tickets were outrageously expensive—the average transatlantic round-trip flight cost approximately $12,000—but living in the future, even for just a few hours, has never been cheap. ✈︎ Want more badass planes delivered straight to your inbox? Join Pop Mech Pro! Today, that future has come and gone. Because of difficult economics and the physical realities of air travel beyond the speed of sound, the Concorde retired more than 15 years ago. No supersonic airliner has risen to take is place—yet. A h...

Until the nineteenth century, Leonardo da Vinci was generally known only as a painter. Little or nothing of his sculpture or engineering works survived, and his notebooks, the only surviving evidence of his insatiable curiosity and fertile mind regarding science and technology, were long hidden away, dispersed in private hands. It was only after 1800 that the record of his intellectual and technical accomplishments, the thousands of pages of writings and drawings that we collectively refer to today as Leonardo’s codices, began to surface, be studied, and published. With the rediscovery of the Leonardo codices, the artist who painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper was recast as the Renaissance visionary who saw the modern world before it was realized. Among the many subjects Leonardo studied, the possibility of human mechanical flight held particular fascination. He produced more than 35,000 words and 500 sketches dealing with flying machines, the nature of air, and bird flight. These investigations of flight are scattered throughout the many da Vinci codices and manuscript collections, but he did produce one short codex almost entirely on the subject in 1505-1506, the Codice sul volo degli uccelli ( Codex on the Flight of Birds). Leonardo’s interest in flight appears to have stemmed from his extensive work on military technology which he performed in the employ of the Milanese court. He filled many notebooks with countless sketches of weapons, military machines, and for...

One museum, two locations Visit us in Washington, DC and Chantilly, VA to explore hundreds of the world’s most significant objects in aviation and space history. Free timed-entry passes are required for the Museum in DC. At the museum and online Discover our exhibitions and participate in programs both in person or virtually. Dive deep into air and space Browse our collections, stories, research, and on demand content. For teachers and parents Bring the Air and Space Museum to your learners, wherever you are. Be the spark Your support will help fund exhibitions, educational programming, and preservation efforts. The Wright brothers—you may have heard of them. But who exactly were they and what did they do? The invention of the airplane by Wilbur and Orville Wright is one of the great stories in American history. The Wright brothers’ invention not only solved a long-studied technical problem, but helped create an entirely new world. Creating the First Heavier-Than-Air Powered Aircraft The desire to fly is both ancient and universal. For centuries, humans took to the sky—by balloons, kites, and gliders. The Wrights took flight to the next level with the first successful heavier-than-air powered aircraft. At the center of the story of the first heavier-than-air powered flight are two talented, yet modest, Midwestern bicycle shop owners who created a world-changing technology: the Wright brothers. Who Were the Wright Brothers? Orville and Wilbur Wright are typically portrayed ...

Some credit the Chinese with the creation of the first paper airplane over 2000 years ago. Others state that Leonardo Da Vinci invented them while he was working on the designs for his However, the modern paper airplane we know and love was designed by Jack Northrop, co-founder of the Lockheed aircraft coorperation, in the early 1930's.

Move over Wright brothers -- it was Shivkar Bapuji Talpade who first flew a flying machine over Chowpatty in 1895, eight years before the American siblings. It-was-SB-Talpade-who-first-flew-a-machine-in-1895-according-to-the-abstract-of-a-paper-to-be-presented-at-the-102nd-Indian-Science-Congress-in-Mumbai-on-January-4-Another-talks-about-advanced-surgeries-in-6000-BC This “flight” was apparently based on sage Bharadwaja’s aviation knowledge, which included “war planes” and aircraft doubling up as “submarines”, according to the abstract of a paper to be presented at the 102nd Indian Science Congress in Mumbai on January 4. “Ancient Sanskrit literature is full of descriptions of flying machines -- vimanas. From the many documents found it is evident that scientist-sages Agastya and Bharadwaja had developed the lore of aircraft construction,” says the abstract of the paper on ancient aviation to be presented by Captain Anand Bodas and Ameya Jadhav. Union minister Prakash Javadekar is expected to inaugurate the session on Ancient Sciences through Sanskrit. The vice-chancellor of Kalidasa Sanskrit University, Bhopal, will preside over the session. Abstracts of papers for the session are up on the website of Mumbai University’s Sanskrit department whose head Gauri Mahulikar will coordinate the event. A paper on aviation says Bharadwaja prescribed a suitable suit for pilots and mentioned “25 types of viruses in the atmosphere which attack the human skin, bones and the whole body...

In late 1903, the Wright brothers and Langley, the Smithsonian’s director, were racing to be the first to fly a powered aircraft. The 69-year-old Langley, an astronomer and inventor financed by federal funding equal to $1.6 million today, worked out of a spacious laboratory in the Smithsonian Castle on Washington’s National Mall. The Wrights, operating on a shoestring budget, labored in their bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, and a field in North Carolina. Both brothers were in their 30s. Langley was first to try to get his flying machine off the ground. The machine, called “The Buzzard” (and also referred to as the Aerodrome A), was 60 feet long with two 48-foot wings. The plan was to catapult the plane into the air from a houseboat on the Potomac River near Widewater, in Stafford County, Va. On Oct. 7 at 12:15 p.m., the machine was launched with Langley’s assistant aboard. The “mechanical bird … took the air fairly well,” the Washington Star reported. “The next instant the big and curious thing turned gradually downward.” Then “all was wreck and ruin.” The aerodrome crashed into the Potomac, a hundred yards from the houseboat. Langley tried again on Dec. 8 on the Potomac in Washington. A large crowd turned out to watch the history-making event. This time, on launch, the machine did “a half double somersault” and crashed into the water “broken and twisted into a mass of wood, steel and linen, with its nose in the mud on the river bottom,” the Star reported. The press dubbed t...