Above the Clouds: Trollheart's Aviation Journal

[Trollheart]

I am, of course, a total nerd, as anyone knows, and while I never quite sunk to the level of being a trainspotter (freaks!) I was, for some time, a plane spotter. No, you're right: I never had a girlfriend, and at this point am unlikely ever to. But I've always been interested in aircraft, from the days of my childhood when my family would go out for the day to nearby Dublin Airport, and one of my earliest memories is of going out onto the viewing balconies (long closed now) and inhaling the sweet smell of aviation fuel. I tell you, it was my drug. And when I got older I of course then gravitated towards the hobby, this getting even better for me when I started working at the airport.

But you don't care about my obsessions. Or me. The only reason I tell you the above is to preface the opening of this, yet another journal. Even the most stoned or drunk among you (which probably covers most of you) will have realised by now what it's about, and if you don't then here's a clue:

Slightly different this time around. Another history journal, yes, but in this one I'll be combining a timeline with other entries, a little like, I guess, my to-be-returned-to History of Classical Music. I realise that, like many of my journals, this one will be of interest to few if any of you, but I don't care. Aviation is one of my hobbies, or was, and I always loved aircraft. So, like the doctor in Family Guy says: we're doing this, whether you like it or not.

What are we doing, exactly, you say? Are you still here? Well that's surprising. Ah, I see: door stuck, is it? Well, while you try desperately to pry it open, let me annoy you by explaining what will be happening here.

I'll be talking at stultifyingly boring length about my favourite aircraft, famous and less famous, airlines, airports, aircraft manufacturers, perhaps even air crashes - anything to do with aircraft or flying. Running alongside that will be the chronological history of flight, from the very beginning up to now.

Legend would have us believe that the ancient Greek Icarus was the first man to attempt to fly. Unsuccessfully, it must be said, though he made some progress before he flew too high, got too close to the sun and the wax holding his makeshift wings to his body melted, leaving him to fall helplessly from the sky, plunging into the sea where, to nobody's shock, he died.

Which event gives us that famous Greek phrase: "Always buy your wax from Honest Aristotle's Mega Wax Emporium, just a short chariot ride from this forum."

I'm going to kick this off as I mean to go on, with no regard for anyone else (as nobody is likely to be reading it) and to satisfy my own dark desires about aircraft. I suppose there's some vague possibility that one or two other people might enjoy these articles, but I don't expect a flood of replies or comments. Be nice if there were people here interested in aircraft who wanted to talk  but I'm not holding out much hope on that front.

Before I get into the history of aviation, then, an article or two. Russia has always been a boastful country, which is to say, its leaders have always been going on about how great their country is, how wonderful Communism is/was, and how Russians do everything so much better than the West.

Well, in this case, they're right.

[Trollheart]

In Soviet Russia, Aircraft fly you!
A Brief potted history of the Antonov Aircraft Company



Oleg Antonov (1906 - 1984)

Technically no longer actually Russian, the Antonov Aircraft Company was founded under the umbrella of the USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, controlled from Moscow by the Soviet government. It was created by Oleg Antonov, who had worked with The Moscow Glider Company designing (guess!) gliders (until one enterprising instructor hopped it to the West in one of their gliders, after which the factory was closed down and gliders banned in the USSR) and then in the Yakovlev Design Bureau where, during World War II, he designed military gliders (presumably the ban was lifted by Stalin in light of the war effort) including one which was apparently capable of lifting a tank!



Strictly speaking though, the AN-40 Krylya Tanka (tank wings) was not a glider, in fact it was not even properly an aircraft, being an actual tank with detachable wings and tail. Antonov did however go on from such experimental ideas to become one of the USSR's biggest (literally) aircraft manufacturers. They would be known as the company that built the largest and heaviest planes, not only in the Soviet Union, but in the world, and remain so, with their AN-225 Mryia, a six-engined monster that holds the current record, behind one experimental flying boat built by millionaire entrepreneur Howard Hughes, and the more recent Stratolaunch, which was retired from service on the death of the founder of the company.

As you might expect from a Russian aircraft manufacturer (the same, I guess, as you would also expect from a British or American or German one) Antonov have been, and continue to be instrumental in producing military as well as civilian aircraft. Perhaps rather amazingly, their first proper production powered aircraft, the AN-2, prototyped in 1946, is still in service today. In fact, production only ceased in 2001. The AN-2 is a biplane, rather unique for the time being made entirely of metal when most other designs, including the likes of the Spitfire and Hurricane, were at least partially made of wood. It is used by the military as well as in the field (sorry) of crop-dusting and firefighting, as an air ambulance and even a small troop carrier. Its toughness, ability to take off and land on very short runways and its lifting power have kept it in service for over seventy phenomenal years.


The trend for large aircraft kicked off in 1957 when Antonov designed the AN-10 and AN-12, themselves based on the popular AN-8 passenger aircraft, but which replaced that model's twin engines with two more, making four in all. Of course, this was not necessarily anything new - the American Douglas DC-4 and DC-6 had been in service since the 1940s, and Britain's Vickers Viscount and Vanguard were plying routes for the likes of British European Airways and BOAC, and even tiny Aer Lingus by the time the AN-10 made its debut. It had competition within its own sphere from the Ilyushin IL-18, launched a year previous, and which had better cargo capacity. The IL-18 became one of the most popular soviet airliners of the decade, oddly enough though being involved in far more accidents than its rival.

Unlike the doughty AN-2, the AN-10 lasted a mere fifteen years in civil service, as Aeroflot, the Russian state airline, retired its fleet in 1972 following a fatal crash which was traced to metal fatigue in the wings. By comparison, the IL-18 is still in service today, even if the number of aircraft still around can be counted on the fingers of two hands. Perhaps not surprisingly, the AN-10 was only operated by Aeroflot, while its military equivalent, the AN-12, served in the Russian Air Force. However, as a transport aircraft and in many variants, it far outpaced its predecessor, being operated by over twenty countries for civilian purposes and in the air force of almost thirty. Again, unlike the luckless AN-10, some models are still in service today.


Bigger is better, could perhaps be the slogan of the Antonov Company, and they certainly live up to that, right up to today. Each aircraft designed by them is literally bigger than the last, and the first real monster to see service was the AN-22, which at the time was the world's first wide-bodied aircraft and remains the largest ever turbo-prop aircraft in the world. Unlike the AN-12, the AN-22 did not develop from a civil version; in fact, the only civil airline to ever operate one remains Antonov Airlines themselves, and they have only the one, with one leased to Air Sofia. The AN-22 was specifically built as what is known as a strategic airlifter, basically an aircraft to get men and material to battlefields and airlift supplies in for humanitarian crises. They were used during the meltdown in Chernobyl in 1986, in the invasion of Afghanistan and Angola, and the war in Bosnia, and were kept busy flying troops in to various former territories of the Soviet Union after the collapse of communism and the breakup of the USSR.

The AN-22 was the first of their aircraft (perhaps the first Russian aircraft but I don't know) to have a twin tail, which helped its stability and performance, and though a passenger version was planned which would have, if realised, carried almost twice as many passengers as a Boeing 747, nothing came of the idea and the aircraft remained an exclusively military one. It could be, perhaps paradoxically, due to this that the AN-22 only suffered nine crashes, compared to the many in which its predecessor was involved, or it could be the fact that it was not sold for use outside the Soviet Union. Either way, up to this point it remained the Antonov aircraft with the best safety record.

Like all major aircraft manufacturers, Antonov moved into the jet arena but was slow to do so. While British and American jet aircraft, both civil and military, had been flying since the late forties and fifties, and Antonov's main rival Ilyushin had the IL-62 in service in 1960, it was 1972 before the first jet-powered aircraft rolled off Antonov's production line, this being the AN-72. In contrast to many western aircraft being made at the time - and even differing from the IL-62, which had four engines mounted at the rear - the AN-72 sported two large turbofan engines which sat above the wing, one of the few aircraft ever to use this design. The Boeing YC-15, which utilised a similar design, was never put into production, and most aircraft manufacturers preferred to sling the engines below the wing (as in the well-known and successful Boeing 737/707/747 aircraft, the Douglas DC-8 and later the Airbus models) or on or beside the tail (Boeing 727/BAC 1-11, DC-9, Lockheed Tristar, DC-10).

The positioning of the engines above the wing however allowed the AN-72 to take advantage of something called the Coanda Effect, which helped make it a reliable STOL (Short Take-Off Or Landing) aircraft, and maintained Antonov's reputation for building aircraft that could operate from the shortest, most remote, most rudimentary airstrips. Briefly, the Coanda Effect uses exhaust gases from the engines blown over the wing surface to boost lift, something impossible on lower-slung or tail-mounted engines. Like most of the heavier Antonov aircraft, the AN-72 saw service both as a military and civilian craft, and in many roles, including air ambulance, VIP transport, cargo, marine patrol and cold weather support. The AN-72 is still in service today.

Cementing their reputation as the builder of the world's largest aircraft, Antonov rolled out the massive AN-124 in December 1982, although the world outside the USSR only got to see it at the Paris Air Show three years later. The first, to my limited knowledge admittedly, Antonov (possibly even first Soviet) aircraft to have a front-loading cargo system whereby the nose lifts up as a door, the AN-124 can carry up to 150,000 kilos (by comparison, a 747 freighter can manage 140,000 ) and has a wingspan of 240 feet or 73 metres (that's equivalent to having three Boeing 737s lined up, one behind the other, on both wings), the aircraft's length being almost equivalent to its wingspan, at 226 feet or 69 metres. The AN-124 is also the first, possibly only Antonov aircraft to see service with UK operators, although any who operated this behemoth have since closed down, perhaps evidence that the demand for such a giant of the skies is not there.

The AN-124 remains the largest military transport in service, and is still being manufactured today with approximately twenty aircraft still in service. Not surprisingly, due to its massive size and niche requirements, there were no huge numbers of the aircraft ever built, but even with the one-off appearance of its intended successor, the AN-225, it is still the second heaviest cargo aircraft ever built, at 214,000 kilos fully loaded and 180,000 empty. This makes it almost twice as heavy as variants of the old reliable 747.

Interestingly, while most western manufacturers such as Boeing, Airbus, McDonnell Douglas and British Aerospace now concentrate almost exclusively on jet aircraft, Antonov continue to produce turboprop models, with the AN-132, a twin turboprop military version of the AN-32 first flying as recently as 2017, the AN-142, designed to take over from the ageing AN-30 making its maiden flight in 1997 and even the venerable AN-2, Antonov's first real aircraft which originally saw service in 1946 being redesigned in 2013. Still, it can't be questioned that their focus lies, like most aircraft manufacturers and as you would expect, in jets, and to that effect, as already mentioned, and as our last look at this company, they have built the largest aircraft in the world.
The largest. In. The world. No contest.

Its wingspan is a staggering 290 feet or 88 metres, almost fifty feet longer than the AN-124, and even unladen it's heavier by far than its predecessor at full weight (295,000 kilos) while when fully loaded it struggles into the air dragging a weight of 640,000 kilos with it. Yeah, that's over THREE TIMES the weight of the AN-124 at full capacity! They call it the AN-225 and it is a beast in any man's language. Powered by six - count 'em: six! - turbofan engines, three under each wing, it was built specifically to transport the Buran Spaceplane, Soviet Russia's answer to the American Space Shuttle, and only one was ever built.

The geopositioning of Antonov has worked against it recently, as the Russian annexation of the Crimea in 2014 led to hostilities between the two nations, and as a consequence Antonov no longer worked alongside Russia. Over the period 2014-15, they produced a total of four aircraft, with none in 2016. In 2017 the state-owned arms manufacturing company Ukroboronprom announced the formation of the equally state-owned Ukrainian Aircraft Corporation, and Antonov was absorbed into this, effectively ceasing to exist as a separate entity.

While other Soviet manufacturers such as Ilyushin and Tupolev may have gone on to create the more popular and well-known Russian aircraft (including the workhorse Tupolev TU-154 and the supersonic Concorde equivalent the Ilyushin IL-86) Antonov always were and always will be known as the people airlines turn to when they want the biggest, the heaviest, the most rugged and the most reliable transport aircraft in the world.

And it all started with gliders...

[Trollheart]

The Man Who Won the Battle of Britain. Sort of.

Winston Churchill once famously said "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few". He could technically have replaced the last word with "one", for without the man whom I'm about to profile in this article, we could all have been speaking German now. Well, not me: I wouldn't be here to tell you about it, as the Nazis had some very firm ideas about anything seen as other than perfection, so I guess I'm lucky. Along with the other few billion people in the world. But while I don't in any way wish to take anything from nor minimise or cheapen the sacrifices made by the brave men who gave their lives in the skies over England in the summer of 1940, as they endeavoured to keep their island free of the Nazi invasion and prevent the war coming to a sudden and decisive end, it's nevertheless true that without this man their task would have been that much harder, perhaps even insurmountable.

R.J. Mitchell (1895 - 1937)

Reginald Joseph Mitchell, more commonly known by his initials, R.J., was an aircraft designer who had a passion for racing seaplanes, but who is remembered for the design and development of one of the crucial fighter aircraft of World War II, the Supermarine Spitfire. Beloved of pilots, the terror of the Luftwaffe, in partnership with the Hawker Hurricane this nimble and deadly aircraft waged war against Hitler between July and October of 1940, as the fate of the Second World War hung in the balance. Its superior design, speed and manoeuvrability allowed its pilots to outfly and outfight the Messerschmidt BF-109s and Focke-Wulf FW190s of Goerring's Luftwaffe and, despite being outnumbered, enable the RAF to hold out against the Germans until the invasion of England was eventually postponed by Hitler.

Through one of those nasty quirks of fate, Mitchell would not live to see his finest creation earn its reputation and take its place in history, as he died two years before the outbreak of war, but he has been rightly celebrated as one of the greatest aircraft designers of his time, and a man without whom the war might not have been won.

A keen engineer from an early age, Mitchell served his apprenticeship at 16 in a locomotive works, later gaining a position in the Supermarine Aviation Works in Southampton, where he would remain for the rest of his career. Supermarine were a company that serviced the seaplane and flying boat industry popular at this time (1917) and so the bulk of Mitchell's projects were of that nature, with aircraft such as the Walrus, Sea King, Sea Eagle and Stranraer. Some of these were built to military specifications, some for the private sector. Some, like the Stranraer, when retired by the military went on to be sold to embryonic airlines and served as passenger aircraft, with the Stranraer and the Walrus flying up to the end of the 1950s.




Supermarine also specialised in designing racing seaplanes, and were well known for producing models which performed well at the annual Schneider Trophy, a race for seaplanes and flying boats. Mitchell designed the S6 and S6B, both of which won the race in 1929 and 1931, the latter breaking the airspeed record when it attained a speed of 407.5 MPH (655.6 KPH). an astonishing achievement in an era where "fast" aircraft typically reached speeds in the low to high two hundreds of miles per hour, and even the Spitfire, which was based on the S6B, could only manage around 370 mph.

After this though Supermarine were tasked by the British government to design a "modern, all-metal, land-based fighter aircraft". With an eye on developments in Europe, and especially Germany, the British Air Ministry worried that its ageing fleet of Hawker Hurricanes would not be enough to repel an expected/feared German invasion of England. Mitchell's offering, the Type 224, was not accepted by the Ministry. It was big and bulky, with fixed undercarriage and an open cockpit, gull-like wings similar to the later Grumman F4U Corsair, which saw action in the Pacific and proved something of a mainstay of the USAF, and could only attain a top speed of 228 mph, which was well below the Ministry's required target of 245. The final indignity for Mitchell was, perhaps, the fact that the design chosen was a biplane, the Gloster Gladiator, which though it saw service throughout World War II and acquitted itself well, was well outmatched by the more modern designs flown by the Luftwaffe. As a consequence, it became the last biplane the RAF ordered.

Disappointed, Mitchell turned to working upon a private project which had been commissioned by Supermarine for an updated Type 224, and adding retractable landing gear and also shortening the wingspan led to the Type 300. This was submitted to the Air Ministry but rejected again. However with the addition of an enclosed cockpit, even shorter and thinner wings and the new Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, the Air Ministry approved its development and with finance secured Mitchell produced the prototype of what would become known and loved as the Spitfire.

Three months after its maiden flight in March 1936, the Air Ministry ordered 310 of the aircraft. It was to prove pivotal in the fight to maintain air superiority in the skies over Britain as the famous Battle of Britain played out from June to October of 1940, denying the Nazis the opportunity to launch Operation Sealion, the planned invasion of England. Some examples are still flying, maintained by enthusiasts, and the Spitfire is a regular and welcome sight at most British and other airshows.

Although he was able to watch the test flights of his new aircraft, Mitchell was diagnosed with rectal cancer and died in 1937, never to see the long-term effects his design would have not only on the coming war, but history itself. He was survived by his son Gordon until 2009, when he too passed away, aged 88.

Various monuments were erected to the memory of R.J. Mitchell, one of which stands in London's Science Museum, another, this a sculpture of his finest work, The Spitfire, takes pride of place in Southampton Airport, although Gordon Mitchell's efforts to have the airport renamed in honour of his father failed. Mitchell's high school, however, was renamed as the Reginald Mitchell High School, while the primary at which he was taught also took his name. The Mitchell Arts Centre in Stoke-on-Trent, his hometown, was constructed in his honour and opened twenty years after his death, in 1957.

[Trollheart]

There's no two ways about it: flying can be a very dangerous business. While aircrew are of course well trained and professional, and probably ninety-nine out of every hundred flights lands safely (I don't know the actual figures) there is always the chance that something will go wrong. And there's so much that can go wrong, from weather conditions to mechanical failure to sloppy maintenance and of course human error. Wind shear, wake turbulence, downspouts are only a tiny fraction of the phenomena that pilots have to contend with, and while they're of course trained to watch for these things, it only takes a split-second's lapse in concentration, the merest moment of distraction or an inability to realise how serious things are before they're fighting for control of the aircraft as it dives, twists and turns, and tries to head towards the ground.

So unfortunately, though they're still rare enough not to stop most of us boarding that plane, air accidents are relatively common, and in this section I'll be looking at some of the worst and most famous. I'm a big fan of the show Air Crash Investigation which I believe goes under other names in the US, notably Mayday, so I know quite a bit about the various crashes and accidents, and while they can be hard to watch or write about (these are real stories, after all, of real people who lost their lives, and the ones left behind) it is nevertheless interesting to see the many and varied causes of the crashes, and, more importantly, how these things being brought to the attention of the authorities end up making air travel that little bit safer.


Date: October 4 1992
Location of crash: Bijlmermeer district, near Schiphol, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Airline: El Al (Israeli Airlines)
Flight: EA1862
Aircraft: Boeing 747-200
Planned destination: Tel Aviv, Israel
Crew: Captain Yitzhak Fuchs, First Officer Arnon Ohad, Flight Engineer Gedlaya Sofer
Cause of crash: Engines detached from aircraft causing a loss of lift
Reason for crash: Metal fatigue
Deaths: 43-47

En route from New York back to their homebase in Tel Aviv, El Al flight 1862, carrying suspected weapons for the Israeli military, takes off from Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport at 1830 and flies east, the suburbs of Amsterdam below them. Suddenly there is an almighty bang and the aircraft lists out of control. Fighting against the plunging, twisting 747, Captain Fuchs manages to get it back under control, but his First Officer tells him that two of the Jumbo's four engines are out of commission, and they head back to the airport for an emergency landing. The mayday call has emergency responders scrambling to meet the stricken aircraft as it struggles back.

Before it can reach the airport, however, the 747 starts to bank to the right again, and this time the captain is powerless to prevent it plunging towards the ground, where it impacts with the apartments in Bijlmermeer, taking out the building and showering others with white-hot jet fuel. All three crew are killed on impact, as well as one other El Al employee, who had been hitching a ride to Tel Aviv, where she was to be married. As the aircraft was only carrying cargo and no passengers, the largest number of casualties occur on the ground, where over forty residents are known to perish, some on impact, some due to smoke inhalation when the apartment blocks burst into flame.

As is often the case though with such tragedies, ordinary people display the selfless courage of movie star action heroes, rushing to the scene and rescuing anyone they can. Andre Bos, a resident whose flat is untouched, miraculously, risks his life in the fire kicking doors open and carrying out people who have been overcome by the smoke, and who otherwise would have died. Firefighters are quick to respond with the first fire engine arriving a mere five minutes after the crash. Hard on its heels come the inevitable news crews, anxious to cover the tragedy.

As the investigation begins, the fear is initially that a bomb or a missile may have taken out the 747. Given that it is an Israeli airline, Palestinian terrorists are suspected, and given that two engines failing at once is unlikely at best, this theory seems to hold water. However, an off-duty police officer reveals that he saw the two engines actually fall off the wing. Both were on the right wing, but when recovered by divers neither engine shows signs of bomb damage. Metal fatigue, combined with a freak set of circumstances, turns out to be to blame. The metal fuse pins holding the engines to the wings broke on one engine - the inner one - which then spun out and hit the outer engine, ripping it off the wing and so depriving the 747 of both the engines on the right.

Conclusions: Microscopic fractures in the fuse pins holding the inner engine to the right wing fail due to metal fatigue. They break and the engine plummets off the wing, hitting against the outer engine and ripping it off, along with a good section of the wing's leading edge. This in turn disrupts the control surfaces that allow the plane to be manoeuvred through the sky. At his current speed, Captain Yitzhak is able to hold the 747 level, but when he has to slow down for landing and raises the nose, he loses control and the aircraft tips over, spiralling helplessly to the ground, where it crashes into the apartment block, exploding on impact.

Measures taken: Boeing strengthens all engine-to-wing fixtures, and initiates stringent checks for metal fatigue, ensuring such an accident is unlikely to ever happen again.

Unanswered questions: While air crash investigators of course do all they can to uncover the reasons behind every crash, and try to answer every questions, often there are gaps in their knowledge, facts left out of the report because they can't be corroborated or sometimes even guessed at, or perhaps because they're not directly pertinent to the investigation. Certainly, in what could be termed a freak, perhaps even unique, accident of this sort, there are bound to be outstanding issues, questions that remain to be answered, doubts and possibly even the sense of a cover-up, as we're dealing here with one of the world's most belligerent military powers. And once military authorities of any sort are involved in a crash which involves civilians, you can bet they're not going to give you the full story.

What exactly was the cargo? Originally it's mentioned as having been for the war effort (not sure what war), though the report doesn't specifically say it's weapons. The Dutch Minister of Transport confirmed the 747 had been carrying fruit, perfumes and computer components, and that there were no weapons or dangerous chemicals aboard. Whether she got this information from the Israeli government or military is uncertain; she may just have gone from the aircraft's cargo manifest, which could have been falsified or fudged (we all remember Matrix Churchill, don't we?) Later it was however admitted, as more and more people from the crash site began to come forward complaining of various medical and mental problems, that there was a quantity of dimethyl methylphosphonate, which can be used in the manufacture of the deadly Sarin gas, though the El Al spokesman who made the revelation in 1998 claimed it was "non-toxic". Well of course he did.

Perhaps more worrying though was the revelation that the tail of the aircraft had been loaded with depleted uranium, to serve as trim weight. This, apparently, was standard practice for Boeing among its fleet of 747s. Why did they use a dangerous radioactive element? Guess you'd have to ask them, but it did raise concerns that radioactive isotopes could have been released on impact and disseminated into the air, something Boeing hotly denied. But again, you'd expect that.

[Trollheart]

Okay then, it's time to get down to serious business. As promised, we're beginning


I should make it clear that here I only intend to concentrate on vehicles which carried men or women into the sky, so balloons are included as long as they had pilots, kites too, under the same proviso, and I think (though I may change my  mind) I'm going to confine my efforts to Earth, so in other words I don't intend at this point to cover space exploration. I will however, where I can, try to include failed as well as successful attempts at flight, for the early pioneers of aviation who failed to realise their dream nevertheless provided research, encouragement and pointed the way for those who came after and who did succeed.

Of course, we can go all the way back into antiquity, even look into legends for the genesis of man's fascination with flight, and as I mentioned in the introduction, the tale of Icarus and Daedelus has come down to us from mythology, but whether that's true or not can't be proven and is moot anyway, as the parable (if it is one) is more concerned with not overstretching your limits, being overconfident and essentially listening to your damn parents and doing what you're told than it is with the mechanics of flight. Similarly, the imaginings and drawings of Leonardo Da Vinci, while amazingly ahead of their time, never led to any actual models being built let alone tested, so they don't really concern us here either. There are tales of men jumping off towers, way back in times before Christ, but that's their business, and although the Chinese were apparently flying man-carrying kites in the early years of the first millennium, such stories can't really be corroborated and even if they can, they're basically snippets which give me nothing to expand on and write about.

I will mention, however, for no other reason than that I think it's both cool and hilarious, that the Indians did develop what became known as "fighter kites", which were kites with sharp, abrasive cord which would dive at other kites, slice their lines and knock them down to the ground. Got to love those guys! Air warfare at a time when the Romans were just getting to grips with chariot races and still worshipping gods who lived on a high mountain.

So our first real stop then is a form of transport which became, for a time, a real fashion and led to some very colourful flights indeed - and surely, too, some very lethal failures. Up, up and away, in my beautiful, my beautiful balloon! If you don't get that reference you are too young and therefore I hate you on general principles.

What a Gas! Balloons and the Beginnings of Manned Flight

Timeline: 1783-1913

While the Chinese (yes, them again!) seem to be credited as having been the first ones to understand the principle of lighter-than-air flight, realising that hot air rises and making what became known as sky lanterns (and are today called Chinese or Paper Lanterns), which consist of a paper balloon with a lamp inside it, and while apparently they are even recorded as having used them in a military role, to scare off enemy troops, and this all in the third century BC, the credit for the first real manned balloon flight goes to the French.

On November 21 1783, Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d'Arlandes travelled from Paris for eight kilometres or five miles at a height of 900 feet, while scant weeks later, on December 1, Jacques Charles flew from Paris in a hydrogen-filled balloon (the previous one having been powered simply by hot air). Within two years the English bettered this, Jean-Pierre Blanchard and John Jeffries crossing the channel and flying the flag (possibly, but not likely, literally) for king and country.


The Montgolfier Brothers (1740/1745-1810/1799)

Sons of a French paper manufacturer, and from a large famuily (the twelfth and fifteenth child respectively) Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier (whom for the sake of ease we'll hereafter refer to as Joseph and Jacques) ran their father's business on the sudden death of their older brother, and Jacques ran it successfully for ten years. Joseph, however, was more a dreamer and inventor, and on seeing laundry billow out as it dried over a fire, he began experimenting with parachutes and balloons, bringing in his brother and leading to their first test flight, which though successful went out of control and crashed. It wasn't manned though, so no harm done, and the concept was proven.

After several test flights before audiences, and eager to claim the honour of being the men to have discovered the science of flight, the brothers conducted a royal performance before King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette on September 19 1783. While it was not a manned flight, as such, it was a sheep/duck/roostered one, as these three animals were sent up in the balloon, in order to confirm there would be no ill effects on living beings ascending into the sky to such a height. The balloon rose to 1,500 feet (you know what? I'm not going to keep converting to metric: you work it out) and flew two miles from the Palace of Versailles, landing safely. No ducks, roosters or sheep were reported to have been harmed in the attempt.

The next step was of course for the brothers to send up humans, and so the flight already spoken of was undertaken, and as a result Pierre, their father, was made a noble by the king and the brothers' fame spread far and wide. As already noted though, other advances were even then on the way, and a month later the first hydrogen-filled balloon made its own historic flight, as Jacques Charles attained a height almost three times the 1,500 feet managed by the Montgolfiers, and a year later Elisabeth Thible becme the first ever woman aeronaut as she rode with M. Fleurant at Lyon in June 1784, oddly enough, both of them singing opera arias.

Jacques Alexandre César Charles (1746-1823)


A professor who had studied Boyle's Law as well as Henry Cavendish and Joseph Black, Charles worked out that hydrogen would be a better propellant than air, and consequently designed and had the Robert Brothers, Anne-Jean and Nicolas-Louis, build the world's first hydrogen balloon. Amid great excitement they launched it on August 27 1783 and it flew for 45 minutes, landing almost 21 kilometres away in a small village where it was attacked by superstitious peasants, who killed it with pitchforks, believing it sent by the devil. Yeah. The next effort was manned, and Charles himself went up, along with Nicolas, flying for over two hours to a height of 1,800 feet and covering over 35 kilometres. This was, however, Charles's only flight; whether the experience unnerved him or not I don't know, but he never flew again.

He did partner with the Robert Brothers on La Caroline, a rigid balloon which would become known as a dirigible, although he did not ride in it himself. The brothers did, with two passengers on July 15 1784 and for 45 minutes, while two months later they completed the first manned flight over 100 kilometres, staying in the air for more than six hours. This record did not stand long though, lasting a mere three months before being broken by yet another Frenchman.


Jean-Pierre Blanchard (1753-1809)

While the Robert Brothers were collaborating with Jacques Charles and conducting flights in hydrogen balloons, Jean-Pierre Blanchard also made his first flight, five months before them. He then moved to England, as the phenomenon of "balloonmania" gripped Europe, a surging interest in balloons and flight, resulting in everything from furniture to clothing - as well as, presumably, balloons - being produced in balloon-like shapes. After several flights in the company of surgeon John Sheldon - a keen balloonist whose previous two attempts had ended in his balloons going up in flames (sounds painful!) - the two quarrelled and Blanchard enlisted the aid of another doctor, this time an American called John Jeffries, with whom he performed the first ever crossing of the English Channel by air, on January 7 1785.

After this momentous and historical feat, Blanchard became a celebrity and travelled around Europe demonstrating his balloons, taking the first balloon flights in Holland, Germany, Poland and Belgium. The invention of the parachute in 1783 allowed him to show how it could be used to escape from a balloon if required, and ten years later it saved his life when his balloon ruptured and he had to abandon it. That same year (1783) he expanded his ballooning exploits to the Americas, where he flew from Philadelphia to New Jersey before an appreciative audience which included many of the Founding Fathers of the United States - Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and George Washington.

Perhaps fittingly, it was in a balloon he died, or at least, had a heart attack from which he never recovered. His wife, now a widow, continued his legacy until ballooning also became the death of her.

[Trollheart]

Brother, Where You Bound? Finding Direction and Taming the Wind

Flying in balloons was all well and good, and as James Onedin once remarked, the wind blows free for any man. But that was the trouble: the wind tended to obey no rules but its own, and any intrepid balloonist who ventured up into the big blue was at its mercy. There was originally no way to steer a balloon, and so they literally drifted on the wind, perhaps going the way the pilot intended, perhaps not: witness Blanchard's original plan to fly northeast to La Vilette in Paris but being blown by the wind across the Seine instead westward towards Billancourt. In that case, it surely didn't necessarily matter which way he went, once the flight was successful. But as ballooning became more widespread and more popular, people wanted to choose the direction in which they flew, and to make sure they went that way.

The only possible way to achieve this was to be able to control the trajectory of the balloon, and to this end people like Henri Giffard (1825-1882) began to experiment with steam engines, but these proved too heavy to be effective, while German Paul Haenlin (1835-1905) did fly in a dirigible powered by an internal combustion engine, and utilising a propellor driven by the engine. His experiments were limited to tethered flight though, due to a shortage of capital. Lack of funds also proved to be the stumbling block which prevented Charles Renard (1847-1905) and Arthur Krebs (1850-1935) from furthering their work on La France, the first powered dirigible, or any aircraft of any sort, including balloons, to return to its place of take-off, after a 23-minute flight around the Eiffel Tower.


Alberto Santos-Dumont (1873-1932)

Often cited by his countrymen as the father of aviation, this Brazilian engineer  managed to conduct the first ever manned and untethered flight of a powered balloon. Heir to the huge Santos-Dumont coffee empire, Alberto moved with his parents to France when his father was paralysed after falling from a horse. Seeking treatment in Europe they arrived in Paris, where young Alberto fell in love with the idea of ballooning, and thereafter dedicated his life to the pursuit of aviation. He was heavily involved in heavier-than-air flight too, but here we will concern ourselves only with his ballooning and dirigible exploits.

After several flights in balloons in Paris, Santos-Dumont decided to build his own, and had a purpose-built factory erected. His efforts bore fruit, as he won the Deutsche de la Muerthe Prize for being the first to make it from the Parc Saint Cloud to the Eiffel Tower and back, though in the run-up to the attempt he did lose one balloon when it started to sink due to a loss of hydrogen, leaving him stranded on the side of a hotel. When he won the prize, to his credit, already being very wealthy he donated the money to Paris's poor. This, along with his fame as a balloonist and love for the city, made him a favourite among Parisians, and they would often watch him float down the streets in his balloon, on his way to lunch in some fashionable cafe.

Like Blanchard before him, Santos-Dumont soon looked to America to further his reputation, and to enhance the interest in ballooning, when he entered his balloon in a competition in St. Louis, however though he did get to meet President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House, his ambitions were thwarted as his balloon was damaged - sabotage was suspected but could not be proven - and he returned to Paris, where he inadvertently contributed to the invention of the wristwatch, after he pointed out to Louis Cartier how difficult it was to check one's pocket watch during flight.

And  here is where we will leave our friend from Brazil for now, but he does figure prominently in the later history of early aviation, and we will return to him in due course.

Ballooning Outside France

Though it can't be denied that France was both the birthplace and the mecca of ballooning, and that anyone interested in the sport came there to test, fly or design their balloons, the interest had spread and there were balloonists in England, Scotland, Ireland and elsewhere around the same time that the French were taking all the headlines.

BRITAIN

Naturally, England was the next biggest hotbed of ballooning. We have already related how Jean-Pierre Blanchard moved there to conduct his own tests and flights, but essentially these were still French-driven. However it was a Scot, James Tylter, who made the first true British attempt,  flying a modest 350 feet for ten minutes on August 27 1874, a month after Jacques Charles and the Robert Brothers had made their historic flight, and, amazingly, exactly one year to the day after their first-ever hydrogen balloon met its fate at the hands of angry peasants in a French village.

Vincenzo Lunardi (1754-1806)

Arriving in London as the attache to the Neapolitan Ambassador, Italian aeronaut Vincenzo *Vincent" Lunardi tackled the doubt and suspicion among Englishmen about ballooning, demonstrating (in company with a cat, a dog and a bird in a cage - what is it with these people and animal passengers? And what sort of fool chooses three animals who are deadly enemies? Can't you even now hear the Looney Tunes theme?) that balloons could fly safely. He flew 24 miles in a hydrogen-fuelled balloon on September 15 1784, one month after the Scot Tytler had made his ascent. The successful flight made him a celebrated figure in England, though Doctor Johnson was less impressed: "In amusement, mere amusement, I am afraid it must end, for I do not find that its course can be directed so as that it should serve any purposes of communication; and it can give no new intelligence of the state of the air at different heights, till they have ascended above the height of mountains, which they seem never likely to do"

Lunardi then flew again in June 1875, this time inviting a woman on board, making Leticia Ann Sage the first Englishwoman to fly, and proving the second time a man, intended to fly as a passenger, stepped down in favour of the lady. This time it was Colonel Hastings who had to gallantly relinquish his place in the balloon as it would have been too heavy with all three of them, while Count Jean-Baptiste de Laurencin had been the gentleman a year earlier in Lyon, who gave up his seat to Elisabeth Thible. Chivalry, huh? Wouldn't happen today! Not so chivalrous, however, was the farmer in whose field Lunardi's balloon landed, ruining his crops, who, despite the presence of a woman, threatened them both till they were rescued.

The Lunardi ballooning tour then moved on to Liverpool before crossing the northern border and heading for Scotland, where he gave demonstrations in Glasgow and Edinburgh, proving as much of a hit here as he had been in England. These things are of course though ever fraught with danger, and the threat of death, and just before Christmas 1785 Lunardi was blown by bad weather into the North Sea, where he remained for some time before being rescued. Perhaps ironically, his take-off spot had been from the local hospital! This experience led him to invent and develop a miniature lifeboat for the victims of shipwrecks.

The next year, disaster struck again when, in Newcastle, spilled vitriol (acid) caused the men holding down Lunardi's balloon to scatter, and one of them became entangled in the ropes as it ascended ahead of time. Dragged up into the air, he fell from a height and died. Lunardi decided it was time to bid farewell to the shores of merry old England, and struck out for pastures new. He travelled to Portugal, Spain and Italy, where he conducted the first ever ascent over the dormant Mount Vesuvius.

Two other attempts in England ended in disaster, with one, a Mr. Arnold, coming down in the River Thames, while the appropriately-named Major John Money, attempting to raise funds for a hospital, was blown, like Lunardi, into the North Sea and, like the Italian pioneer, only survived by being rescued by a small boat.


James Sadler (1753-1828)

The first English balloonist though was James Sadler, a pastry cook by trade, and he made his first ascent only two months after James Tytler, however his flight achieved a height of ten times as high as his Scottish contemporary, over a distance of six miles. He attempted to emulate Jean-Pierre Blanchard in 1875 but was unable to cross the Channel, landing instead in the Thames, and he was another who seemed to prefer the company of the feline sort, as a cat (not sure if it was his pet or not) accompanied him on one of his later flights. Another to realise the dangers inherent in his chosen sport, Sadler was badly injured after having been thrown from his balloon and dragged along for some distance before the balloon disengaged and flew off without him. A further trauma ensued in 1824 when his son died in a ballooning accident.

During his time as a balloonist, Sadler set a speed record by flying over a hundred miles in an hour in the teeth of a gale, attempted to cross the Irish sea from Ireland in 1812 and almost died in the effort, and was asked to travel to London in 1815 to open the Jubilee celebrations for that year. Despite being a celebrity in his own time, Sadler's low social status meant that he was virtually ignored by history, as men who were rich and noble took all the plaudits, but nobody can take from him the title of having been the first Englishman to fly in a balloon on his home soil.


Charles Green (1785-1870)

Undoubtedly the most famous English balloonist, Green was another man of humble origins, being the son of a fruit grocer, but while James Sadler is all but airbrushed from the history of ballooning Green is celebrated. He undertook both the longest flight and the one with the most passengers, the latter amounting to at one point eleven people not including himself, so twelve in one balloon, the great Nassau Balloon he built himself, and the former an epic journey from England to Germany, covering a distance of over 500 miles in just over eighteen hours. Tragedy again struck in 1837, though not for Green: one of his passengers, a painter called Robert Cocking, decided to test a parachute he had made by, well, jumping out of the balloon. Obviously the QA Department were less than effective. Unsurprisingly, he died on impact. Should have stuck to painting.

Green certainly flew the highest of the balloonists at the time, reaching at one point in 1838 the ceiling of almost five miles, and he seems to have been victim of quite some misfortune, having at one point to take refuge on the balloon itself when sabotage or vandalism caused the basket or car to separate from the balloon, the ensuing journey causing him and his passenger many injuries. For some reason he decided to take a deaf and dumb guy up in a storm (!) and in 1841 was almost thrown out of the balloon along with his passenger. He was responsible for some major strides forward in the technology, including the invention of a guide rope which allowed the balloon to be steered, and the discovery that coal-gas could be used in place of hydrogen, the latter being very expensive to use and time-consuming to inflate balloons with. On his retirement from ballooning in 1852 he had made over 500 ascents and flights.

IRELAND (Yes, Ireland! Don't look so surprised!*)

Richard Crosbie (1755-1824)

The first Irishman to fly, Crosbie emulated his peers by sending balloons piloted by animals, notably a cat, which had to be rescued from where it landed near the Isle of Man (hey, at least it wasn't the Isle of Dogs!), before attempting the flight himself. No doubt the cat wished him luck! And luck he did indeed have. On January 15 1875 he rose from Ranelagh Gardens in Dublin in a hydrogen balloon he called his "aeronautic chariot" or "flying barge" and flew to Clontarf, a distance of about six miles. Obviously a showman, like every other balloonist, Crosbie's ascent was witnessed by an excited crowd of onlookers, his mode of dress described as "a robe of oiled silk, lined with white fur, his waistcoat and breeches in one, of white satin quilted, and morocco boots, and a montero cap of leopard skin."

His intention had been to cross the Irish Sea, but due to the early fall of darkness he decided instead to land at Clontarf. However he did try again six months later, this time making it halfway across before having to be rescued by a barge which had been shadowing him. The Lord Mayor of Dublin was not best pleased, having instigated a ban on ballooning as too many people were wasting time staring up at the sky instead of working. Spoilsport.


*Hell, I know I was!

USA

Thaddeus S.C. Lowe (1832-1913)

One of the foremost balloonists of the US, Lowe's career would be interrupted by the American Civil War (see further) in which he would serve as the very first ever observational balloon pilot, helping the Union war effort tremendously, despite receiving little or no recognition for his efforts. Coming from pioneer stock, Lowe was a respected politician and scientist, and developed an abiding interest in and love for the new sport of aviation, building his own balloons and even inventing a system whereby hydrogen could be synthesised from charcoal and steam.

A keen adherent of the possibility of transatlantic travel by balloon, Lowe constructed a huge specimen which he named City of New York, later renaming it to the Great Western, but though he successfully travelled from Philadelphia to New York, his first attempt to cross the ocean ended in disaster when the balloon was ripped open by the wind, and the repair made to the balloon did not satisfy his sense of safety for a second attempt, so he opted to wait till the spring of the next year. April 1861 saw him fly from Cincinnati, but rather than land at his chosen destination he was blown off-course and landed in South Carolina, where Confederates took him to be a spy and placed him under arrest. Having established that he had nothing to do with the Union Army, he was allowed to go free, but on his return to the North was summoned to Washington by the President, where he would later form and run the Union Army Balloon Corps (see further). The outbreak of the Civil War ended his attempts to fly across the Atlantic.

After the war, Lowe was in great demand for his expertise, but refused all offers to head any more military ballooning operations. He helped all he could though, particularly aiding (but not taking part in) the Brazilian Balloon Corps and speaking to Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, who would of course later be famous for giving his name to one of the all-time classic rock bands. Oh, and also for designing airships, apparently.

Lowe went on to invent many things, including the already-mentioned process for making hydrogen from charcoal, and ice-making machines, and in fact he became extremely rich, but he never returned to ballooning after the war, perhaps dispirited by his reception by the Union Army, or maybe his brush with malaria had taught him to value his life more than he had done.


John Wise (1808-1879?)

Unlike his contemporary above, and other balloonists in America and elsewhere, Wise was purely in it for the sport and enjoyment, and the scientific gain. He was not particularly interested in making money from commercial ventures, and though he joined the Union Air Balloon Corps under Lowe when his country called him, he fell out with the commander and was forever at loggerheads with him. He pioneered the first airmail delivery in 1859, and in 1838 constructed a balloon that would, when ruptured, convert into a parachute, thus allowing the pilot and passengers to descend to the earth safely. He was however badly burned in an accident when the gas in his balloon exploded, and he was also thrown from the basket on another occasion, sustaining injuries that time too, while his balloon ascended without him.

He invented the rip panel, which allowed descending balloons to be gradually deflated, whereas prior to this deflation had to be accomplished by hand, as in a dangerous - and often fatal - manoeuvre the balloonist would have to climb up onto the balloon as it bounced along the ground, to release the valve and let the air out. He is credited with discovering the jetstream, and also the effects of the sun on heating the gas in the balloon, and built a black balloon to take advantage of this fact. He too tried to cross the Atlantic, but, as related in the section on military balloons, coming up, while attempting this with John LaMountain the balloon was caught in a windstorm and badly damaged, putting paid to his ambitions. An ally of LaMountain, he was later reunited with him in the Union Army Balloon Corps, which spelled trouble for Thaddeus Lowe as the two joined forces against him.

In true ballooning and adventurer style, John Wise vanished on a trip from east St. Louis, September 28 1879, and though the body of his passenger was found in Lake Michigan, his own was never recovered, nor was the balloon. This is the last that was ever heard of John Wise.

[Trollheart]

Death from Above: Military Balloons

Almost since man first looked up into the sky and dreamed of flying, he has dreamed of using that power to destroy his enemies. Or, to put it another way, any new advance in technology, especially transport, tends to have the military sticking their noses in to see how they can exploit it. And so it was with balloons. Naturally, the first and most obvious use they were put to was that of observation, as balloons allowed an army the unprecedented view from the sky where they could spy on the enemy and relate troop positions and movements, or warn of planned attacks or manoeuvres. Lanterns had of course been used by the Chinese for yonks, as already noted in the introduction to this section, first to scare off the enemy but later too as a way of signalling their own troops.

Discounting that use though, it was once again our friends the French who cottoned to the idea of using balloons in warfare. Well, they had really invented them, hadn't they? During the Battle of Fleurus in 1794, and again at the Battle of Mainz the following year the French Aerostatics Corps deployed balloons as observational tools. Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph had cause to rue his approval of the French balloons in 1854 when France went to war against Austria five years later, and these powerful new weapons were turned against him, sealing his country's defeat. Six years earlier (1849) the Austrians themselves had tried to make weapons of balloons, loading over 200 with small bombs intended to be floated in over the city of Venice. However, the wind was as ever a cruel and fickle mistress, and most of the balloons got blown off course, some even sent back to the forces that had launched them!

The outbreak of the American Civil War provided another opportunity for balloons to be used, though wisely only in reconnaissance, as any sort of aggression on the part of a balloon against enemy forces would likely have resulted in the balloon being fired upon, and the pilot would have no means of defending himself. Two types of balloon observation were considered: tethered and free flight. Tethered was safer, as the balloon always remained anchored to the ground by men holding on to its ropes, allowed it to be returned to its point of origin despite the wind direction, and also enabled its pilot to send telegraph messages down the lines to report his findings. Free flight, on the other hand, risked a balloon drifting defenceless and directionless into enemy territory, and precluded any report until the balloon had returned and landed.

In charge of the newly-formed Union Army Balloon Corps was a man we met in the last section, Professor Thaddeus S.C. Lowe, a keen and successful balloonist who had been preparing for an Atlantic crossing when war broke out, and who instead offered his services to the President. Lowe had his detractors, including men under him, like John Wise and John LaMountain, who hated him and tried to discredit him. In the case of the latter, this may have been brought about by jealousy of Lowe's achievements in ballooning, whereas LaMountain had, in concert with Wise, crippled his balloon, the Atlantic, and lost another one, the Saratoga, in a windstorm. LaMountain fought for free flight to be the standard in the UABC, while Lowe favoured tethered flight, and being in charge, this is what was chosen. Rather darkly hilariously, after an argument over which should be used eventually spilled out into a challenge, and LaMountain conducted a successful free flight reconnaissance, he was shot down by his own troops on his return, as they did not recognise him!  By 1862 Lowe had had enough of LaMountain's constant attacks on him and had him dismissed.

In September 1861 Lowe became the very first military spotter, ascending in his balloon over the Confederate camp at Falls Church, Virginia, and by having the Union artillery fire on the camp he was able to advise them by flag signal how to adjust their angle until the camp was quickly taking accurate fire. Balloons had, for the first time, progressed from being merely an observational tool of the army to actually taking part in, or at least assisting in an attack. Later, when the battle turned inwards to forested areas which were hazardous to balloon flight, Lowe achieved another first as he had his balloons launched from the decks of Union ships, thereby effectively becoming the first airborne vehicles to take off from a seabound vessel, turning the simple coal barges into embryonic aircraft carriers.

And what were the Johnny Rebs doing while all of this was going on, you may ask? Go on: I said you may ask, and I may answer. In fact, I will. Answer, that is. Well, the fact is that the Confederates came late to the party, saw what the Union boys was doing, and thought we can do that too. But they lacked a proper expert of the calibre of Lowe, or even LaMountain or Wise, all of whom supported the Union cause, so they were left to rely on inexperienced men, leading to one of the balloons spinning helplessly in the air, while another was shot down - again - by their own troops when it drifted over their territory. As well as this, the lack of coke gas, used extensively in the Union balloons, meant that the South had to put up with hot-air-filled Montgolfier style balloons, and short of silk for making the balloons the call was put out to the good ladies of the South to sacrifice their silk dresses, which were gathered up and made into one huge balloon. Which was promptly stranded on its boat and snaffled by the Union, surely another reason for those young ladies to have to blush. This surely reflects the later request from Baron Von Munchausen in Terry Gilliam's crazy movie of the same name, when the baron declared "Ladies! I need your knickers!" And the ladies responded, allowing the good baron to ascend and escape the city by, you might say, getting into their panties.

Because the Union Army Balloon Corps was never formally inducted as a military organisation, none of those who served in it gained any sort of rank, which effectively made them civilians and meant that, should they come down in enemy territory during a reconnaissance mission, they would be liable to be treated as spies and executed. Further, the rank-and-file of the army treated them with disdain, considering them mere showmen and not appreciating or realising the important role people like Lowe and Wise had played in the war. Their impact was soon forgotten, as Lowe contracted malaria in June 1862, and when he returned a month later found all his equipment had been handed back. Having been then reduced to the rank of a common soldier (though still a civilian) he was sent to Fredericksburg to fight, but within a year he had resigned and the Balloon Corps died with his departure.

Tally-Ho Chaps! British Efforts in Military Ballooning

Just as the Americans were losing interest in ballooning the British were kindling theirs. Royal Army Engineers tried to plead their case in 1862, however the cost of hydrogen gas was at the time too expensive. By the time the Second Boer War began though (1899-1902) the idea of using balloons for military observation was accepted, and balloons were put into service, but it was the outbreak of World War I (1914-1918) that really saw observation balloons come into their own, as they emulated the Yankees in the Civil War by using them to direct artillery. Of course, large and mostly stationary balloons such as those presented tempting targets to fighter aces, who often took on the challenge of taking them down. The balloons were protected by anti-aircraft batteries, so it could be a dangerous risk.

Later, of course, barrage balloons and dirigibles would feature in the war effort, and of course the feared and hated airships of Count Von Zeppelin would become the doodlebugs of the Great War.

[Trollheart]

The Birth of Boeing's Biggest Baby,
and the Midwife Who Made it all Happen:
Juan Trippe, Pan Am and the Genesis of the 747

Ask anyone, even today, to name an aircraft and the chances are high that they'll say 747, or at least Jumbo Jet. For a very long time, from the late sixties really up to the 1990s, the Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet was king of the skies. It was the largest American airliner in the world, and its distinctive hump-cockpit shape was instantly recognisable, even by those who had only the most rudimentary knowledge of or experience with aircraft. At one time, it seemed every airline in every country flew 747s, and though mostly retired now, it's still the aircraft of choice for the most powerful man in the world. I personally never got to fly in one - I only flew twice in my life - but I would imagine of the people reading this, a very large percentage would have travelled on a Jumbo Jet to or from their destination. It really was the most popular aircraft in the sky for decades.


Juan Trippe (1899 - 1981)

But it was almost never built. The main driving force behind the effort to ensure it was, the man who set up and ran one of the most successful and recognisable airlines in the world, Pan American (known as Pan Am) was Juan Trippe, and his story is an interesting one.

And here it is.

Born in New Jersey into a tradition of naval service, Juan Trippe enlisted as a pilot in the US Navy Reserve in 1918, but by the time his flight training was completed the First World War was over, and he returned to college. After graduation he got a job in Wall Street, but although he soon realised the life of a trader was not for him, this experience would stand him in good stead for his later entrepreneurial life. He set up his own airline, Long Island Airways, in 1923, using surplus aircraft from the war to provide a "luxury air taxi" for wealthy clients, but the airline folded after two years. A year after Long Island Airways ceased trading, Trippe took over another small airline called Bee Line and renamed it Colonial Air Transport, moving its headquarters from  Boston to New York, and reoganising its fleet of mostly German Fokker biplanes. Colonial secured a contract to carry the US airmail, one of the first commercial airlines in America to do so. Three years later, Trippe would basically form Pan American Airlines.

It may seem odd, to those of us who grew up seeing the giant blue-and-white-liveried 747s fly into our city airports, that the airline which was for decades to become the unofficial flag carrier of the USA began in the Caribbean, and its first official flight was to Cuba. Worried that the German-owned Colombian airline, SCADTA, was likely to get the lucrative contract being offered by the US Postal Service to fly mail from Key West, Florida to Cuba, two US Army Air Corps officers teamed up with Trippe, who had just set up the American Corporation of the Americas (ACA)  to enable him operate in the Caribbean and had acquired American International Airways, which had the all-important holy grail, the landing rights in Havana. The executives from Pan American, ACA and a third investor, Atlantic, Gulf and Caribbean Airways all combined then under the banner of Pan American Airways, and won the contract. Pan Am had been born.


The World's Favourite Airline

From the beginning, the airline was championed and protected by the US government, which saw it as the unofficial official US Airline, giving Pan Am an edge over the other emerging American airlines such as TWA (Trans World Airlines), Northwest Orient, Delta, Braniff, United and of course American Airlines. Pan Am's all-but-monopoly on overseas routes must surely stand as one of the first instances of antitrust in America, and surely one of the few actually aided by the government. This unprecedented support by the White House helped Pan Am grow to become one of the biggest and most successful airlines, not only in America but in the world, and soon allowed it to use its tagline "the world's favourite airline."

Somewhat like a Mafia mobster wiping out or absorbing the competition, and in the vein of later mega-corporations swallowing up smaller companies, Pan Am bullied and bought its way across South America, sewing up routes across the continent as smaller airlines were bought out, forced to merge, or put out of business altogether, and all of this with the weight of the US government behind it. By the end of the decade South America had been divided between Pan Am and United Aircraft and Transport Corporation (UATC), which would later give birth to the Boeing Company, essentially meaning that in effect the continent was controlled  by Pan Am and Boeing. It would not be the last time the two companies worked so closely together.

1937 saw Trippe gaze across the Atlantic Ocean, as he eyed destinations in Europe, and his "Clipper" Sikorsky flying boats began services to the UK and Ireland, soon afterwards heading east towards Asia. Pan Am did its bit in the war, ferrying troops and supplies through the port of Foynes in Limerick to the battle zones from 1941 onwards, their clippers being the only aircraft at the time capable of intercontinental travel, and so very much in demand. After the war though, Pan Am's protection dwindled and then ceased, as new regulations made such monopolies illegal, and the airline had to face competition from a whole host of new airlines all vying for its routes. In 1955 Trippe began his long association with Boeing when Pan Am passed on the chance to purchase the world's first jetliner, the De Havilland Comet. This may have been due to its being of British, not American manufacture, but may also have had something to do with the poor - almost abysmal - safety record the aircraft had. Whatever the reason, Pan Am became the first customer to order, receive and fly Boeing's first ever jetliner, the immensely popular Boeing 707.

I suppose it would only be fair though to say that Trippe wasn't putting all his Pratt & Whitneys in one basket (oh ho ho: aviation in-joke for nerds!) as he also ordered a fistful of Douglas DC-8s, the perennial rival to the 707. Trippe would be the man who all but single-handedly ushered the jet age into America, as, when other airlines were wary of taking a chance on the new jet aircraft, Pan Am's maverick president boldly inked orders for Douglas DC-8s and Boeing 707s. More, as noted in the introduction above, it would be he who would all but force - and certainly partially bankroll - the development, building and launch of what would become the world's favourite airliner, to go with the world's favourite airline, but before we get into that, we should perhaps look into the man behind the company that would build it.



William Boeing (1881 - 1956)

William Boeing was almost twenty years older than Juan Trippe, and like him, also attended Yale, but unlike the founder of Pan Am he did not graduate, dropping out in 1903 (as Trippe would have been crawling around, or possibly just learning to walk upright) to go into the lumber business. It's interesting - hardly startling but still interesting - that both these men, who would go on to be absolute titans in the world of aviation, initially tried far different careers, Trippe on Wall Street while Boeing shipped wood, though in his case his business did involve transport, if by canal rather than by air.

Born of an Austrian mother and a German father, Boeing's family name was originally Böing, which I suppose he thought was the kind of name that could get you laughed at, though I can't so far find out where, when or how he changed it. It does explain though why the surname is one I have never heard applied to anyone else, though of course it may have done, but I've never come across it. Okay well this is interesting. I read that the Boeing name came about when William's father (also called William, but the German spelling, so Wilhelm) decided to Anglicise it (not quite sure how adding an "e" Anglicises it, but there you go), somewhere around 1880, so possibly before his son was born. More to the point, Wilhelm also worked in lumber, so whether his son ended up in the family business or not I don't know, but he was following in his father's footsteps. Okay no he did not: Wilhelm worked for a lumber concern in Detroit, whereas William moved to Washington to seek his fortune and set up his own lumber company there. Boeing's father died when he was only eight years old, so I guess he would not have known him that well.

A trip to an aircraft show in 1910 shifted young William's focus from ships and boats to planes, and indeed he had caught his first sight of a "flying machine" the previous year. He soon took delivery of his first aircraft, a Martin TA Hydroaeroplane, and when it crashed and parts were not going to be available for months, he decided he and his friend Commander George Westervelt would build their own, which they duly did, coming up with the B&W seaplane, which would become the Boeing Model 1. This had an almost epiphanic effect on Boeing, and he decided his future lay in the manufacture of airplanes.

Just like across the water, where aircraft were being looked down on (something of an oxymoron, but you know what I mean) by the military, the US Navy did not see any future in the flying machines, considering them not worth the time, slow and cumbersome, and as America was not at the time involved in World War I - and even when it did enter it, sent no aircraft for obvious reasons - there was little enthusiasm and less support for the idea of airplanes. A staunch advocate for his beloved aircraft, William Boeing did all he could to convince the government, the military and the populace of the importance of aviation development, even going so far as to fly over a football field and drop cardboard bombs on the spectators, with notes attached to them pointing out that had these been enemy bombs they might all very well be dead.

I must say, I'm a little baffled as to why, at this point, the relatively few aircraft built in the USA were all seaplanes. Perhaps it was because there were as yet no airports or landing strips, or maybe it was because flight was kind of still in its infancy, certainly in America, and if you had to crash I suppose it was better to do so on a lake than onto the ground. Also, maybe the isolated nature of water landings kept people from complaining about noise? I expect we'll find out when we go deeply into the early history of aviation again, but for now, it seems to me to be a bit of a mystery.

At any rate, at a time when one of the bloodiest battles of World War I was raging as the word Somme was to be carved forever in blood and death into human history, William Boeing inaugurated his new aircraft company, the Pacific Aero Products Company, and began making aircraft. Less than a year later, he changed the company name to the Boeing Airplane Company. With the end of hostilities in 1918, demand dropped for aircraft as a surplus of used military airplanes hit the market, and Boeing kept his company going by diversifying into manufacturing furniture and speedboats, which sold well, until 1921, when the US Post Office, having lost all but nine of its forty pilots flying the US Air Mail route, decided to give it up and Congress tendered for the contract. Boeing won it, and with it came the opportunity to run passenger aircraft, as the nascent American aviation industry began to gather steam.

This did not last, however, as in 1934 the US government, in what must surely be seen as both a hypocritical move, considering the patronage they had given to Pan Am, and surely an attempt to placate voters, decided Boeing had too much of a monopoly on air travel, and cancelled the air mail contracts they had. After appearing before a Senate hearing in 1934, William Boeing retired, to concentrate on horse breeding and land development. Something that is often glossed over though is his overt racism, as the land he bought after retirement was leased on condition that only whites could settle there. Wiki tells me that "the Boeings placed racially restrictive covenants on their land to enforce segregation, forbidding properties from being "sold, conveyed, rented, or leased in whole or in part to any person not of the White or Caucasian race." Non-whites could only occupy a property on the land if they were employed as a domestic servant "by a person of the White or Caucasian race." Lovely.

Boeing of course continued and thrived without him, as he surely had known and expected it would, becoming the premier aircraft manufacturer in not only America, but the world, and more or less remains so today. After losing a contract for the US military to build a new transport aircraft, Boeing used the plans they had drawn up, and the basic frame of their bid to later develop the aircraft which would become the largest passenger airliner in the world at the time, and would also be the most successful ever built.

[Trollheart]

Boeing's willingness to look to the future and take risks nobody else would led to the company being the first in America - but not the world - to conceive and produce a jet airliner, at a time when everyone else (other than the British, with the ill-fated Comet) were flying on turboprop and piston propellor-driven planes. Boeing's biggest rival, Douglas, proved to be too timid to make the leap, allowing Boeing to bring their 707 out almost a year before Douglas entered the field with the DC-8. Boeing was, then, quickly established as the first name in aviation innovation, speed and comfort, and the first choice for anyone wishing to travel through the air.

When submitting designs for the US Air Force, all companies tendering - Lockheed,  Martin Marietta (both of whom would merge in the 1990s to form Lockheed Martin), Boeing, Douglas and General Dynamics - were instructed that cargo needed to be loaded from the front, so the nose had to tilt up. This meant raising the cockpit above the nose, as otherwise it would be impossible for the pilot to see, as the raised nose would block his view, and would lead in Boeing's case to the distinctive "hump" that instantly identified their 747.

As the demand for air travel skyrocketed (sorry) after the war, and airports began to crowd up as people waited in line, we return to our friend Juan Trippe, now head of Pan American Airlines. Trippe used his airline's standing and his own political power and connections to request Boeing to construct a new airliner, to be over twice the size of the current largest, their own 707, putting in a pre-order for twenty-five of the aircraft, which had not even been designed yet, never mind built, and committing an enormous sum, even then, of 525 million dollars, more than a staggering 5 BILLION dollars today.

The man Boeing chose to head the project was this guy.


Joe Sutter (1921 - 2016)

Although the management team was led by Malcolm Stamper, later to rise to the top job and in fact make history at Boeing as its longest-serving president, it was Joe Sutter who really did the work that counts. An engineer who had worked for the company since 1940, having made a crucial decision to choose between Boeing and Douglas, both of which had recognised the young man's potential and had offered him a job. Believing that Boeing were more focused on the future - jet development - Sutter chose them, a decision which a former executive of the company believed saved Boeing from being bought out by its rival. Presiding over the initial plans for the Boeing 747 and seeing it through to launch, Sutter is rightly known as the "father of the 747". Today the main engineering building at Boeing's Everett plant is named after him.

Looking back to the lost military contract, and with fears that the emergent idea of supersonic travel would eventually make the new airliner obsolete - even today, supersonic passenger travel is not a reality, the only example having been the Concorde, and that was only for the super-rich - Sutter concentrated on making the new aircraft capable of carrying freight, particularly with the inclusion of the idea from the original plans for a front-loading aircraft, something I think (but will have to check) had never been done before. If aircraft were carrying cargo, transport planes like the C-130 Hercules would load from the rear. This idea of a nose-loading design meant Sutter had to also use the raised cockpit idea, which became, as mentioned,  the distinctive bump or hump that is the trademark of the aircraft.

Juan Trippe originally wanted a full double-decker aircraft but this was not seen to be possible. In fact, it would be the twenty-first century before the first - and at the time of writing, only - airliner of this type would fly, the Airbus A380. From a quick perusal of the figures, it looks like it has not been the roaring success the company had hoped, with just over 500 sold up to this year. This, despite the fact that it must rank as one of the safest aircraft in the sky, with only three crashes resulting in absolutely no fatalities. That's damned impressive.

Building the world's largest airplane was a huge undertaking, and required an equally huge factory. None that existed were suitable, so Boeing had to build their own, on land in Everett, Washington. The area they chose was heavily wooded, and so over six hundred acres of forest had to be felled and cleared. A railway line was also laid, in order to move parts and materials to the factory, though the time chosen to build turned out to be a bad one, as the area saw its heaviest rainfall in years, with the skies opening for sixty-eight straight days. Hey, even Noah only had to contend with forty! In order to meet this challenge, over 100 acres was asphalted, and the building could commence.

Even so, the rain had delayed and put back their schedule so badly that the aircraft prototype had already been built before the building housing it was completed: they literally built the factory around the aircraft, men having to wear hard hats and contend with with the freezing, driving rain and the cold Washington winds as they worked. Because of the almost insurmountable hazards the team faced in their quest to bring in the aircraft on time, they earned the name "the Incredibles".

Commercial Supersonic Flight: Pie in the Sky?

Just to digress very slightly here for a moment, the prevailing ideas about the future of supersonic transport in the 1960s surprise me. Given that Chuck Yeager had only managed to break the sound barrier for the first time in 1949, just over ten years ago at this point, and that the military had only cracked it in 1954 with the F-100 Super Sabre, the chances surely of widespread commercial supersonic aviation were about as likely as, at that point, man colonising the Moon! I mean, even now, here we are in the twenty-first century and still, other than the Concorde, which is now retired, the only supersonic aircraft are still military ones. We still fly on our holidays (well, you do: I haven't had a holiday in 20 years!) on subsonic airliners. And do we care? Is anyone bothered that it takes hours to fly the Atlantic?

And yet, the idea behind the 747 has repeatedly been stated that it was to be a "stop-gap" aircraft, there just to take up the slack and mark time until the new breed of SST (SuperSonic Transport) airliners came on the scene. I mean, they really believed and expected this. In the mid-sixties! So the 747 was not expected to be the success it ended up being, and it was envisioned by its designers that it would take up the role of a freight-carrying plane when those SSTs were blasting their way across the sky, making New York to Sydney in an hour, or whatever. Jesus in the first-class cabin on a non-supersonic flight! Talk about your predictions of hover cars in the late twentieth century!

Never before - nor, I think, since - has an airline had such a hands-on input into the design of an aircraft. Usually, at least now, airlines decide what aircraft to purchase and order accordingly, but it would not be any exaggeration to say that Juan Trippe loomed large over the design, build and testing of the Boeing 747, doing the equivalent, it seems, of a television network giving notes to a producer or director; he was sceptical about the new aircraft's proposed speed, also unhappy with its projected range, and while he wanted a double-decker aircraft, the more to fit in as many passengers as possible, this proved outside of safety regulations, as the passengers on the upper deck could not be evacuated, along with those on the lower, in the regulation 90 seconds required by the FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration. And so Sutter and his crew, never happy with the double-decker design anyway, as well as other suggestions such as a high-wing, engine in the tail and and a three-engine model, worked on ways to have the new airliner accommodate the amount of passengers Boeing, or rather Trippe, wanted.

Given that so much was riding on the development of the 747, given Trippe's buying power and the ability he had to blackball Boeing if they got it wrong, it would not be stretching it at all to say that the very future of the company rested on the success of this new aircraft. With all the money being pumped into it, and no other project being considered, to say nothing of Boeing's reputation and standing in the world of aviation design, the company would stand or fall on the results. No pressure, then!

Putting all their efforts into the area in which they erroneously believed the 747's future would eventually lie, as a cargo freighter, Sutter's team designed a twenty-foot wide body to allow the aircraft to accommodate two pallets of freight side by side. This, then, made the emerging 747 the widest-bodied aircraft in the world at this time. Mind you, if he couldn't have his double-decker design, Trippe was not a man to allow any of that space to go to waste, i.e., not make money for him. When it was suggested that the raised area behind the cockpit could be used as a rest area for the crew, he shook his head. "Make it into a cocktail lounge," he advised. Boeing obliged, but drew the line at his idea for passenger staterooms with special windows. Hey, they already had to install a staircase (originally spiral, later straight) in order to allow access to the upper deck and what would be its cocktail lounge, making this, I believe, at least until the advent of the Airbus A380, the only airliner with two floors, the upper reached by stairs.

In terms of safety, though there have been 61 747s destroyed or no longer reparable due to accidents, few of these were down to design flaws or maintenance issues, and indeed half of the losses involved no deaths, which is pretty remarkable, I think. Of course, 747s have been involved in some of the worst and most famous air disasters of our time, but these crashes have only involved the aircraft, not been endemic to it: essentially, they could have occurred with any aircraft, but they just happened to be 747s. Given that there have been over 1,500 747s in service throughout the years, that percentage is very low, about 4%.

Not only did the 747 revolutionise just about every aspect of aviation (and provide more employment, not least due to its additional crew member requirement) but it changed the way airports worked. Juan Trippe would have to spend another 215 million dollars redesigning JFK Airport in order to accommodate the new star of his airline, rebuilding terminals, lengthening runways, and providing new maintenance facilities to accommodate the behemoth, almost another 100 million. Of course, this would be a drop in the ocean compared to the revenue he would receive as Pan Am flew 747s for decades and they did indeed prove to be the seachange (so to speak) that aviation had been waiting for. With the 747 in service, air transport became cheaper for those who could not afford it previously, flight times became shorter and distances covered longer, and those who could afford to travel first class were eager to experience the "flying penthouse" of the upper deck of a Jumbo Jet.

The name, incidentally, was coined by the media. The 747 had never been marketed as a jumbo jet, but the appellation stuck, and helped to make the 747 the best-loved aircraft in the sky for over sixty years.

Gentlemen, Start Your Engines: Pratt & Whitney to the Rescue

Of course, any aircraft is only as good as the engine that drives it, and Trippe had originally wanted General Electric's engine, which had been included in the failed Boeing bid for the military transport contract, this being  turbofan, an engine which drew air in and circulated it through huge fans before spitting it out the rear, giving the aircraft its thrust. The GE engine, having been designed for the slower military plane, would not however be suitable for the faster 747, so was discounted in favour of the new Pratt & Whitney JT9D, then the most powerful engine in the world: one of its powerplants had more thrust than all four of those on the Jumbo's predecessor, the Boeing 707.

At the official signing ceremony for the first contracts for Pan Am's 25 747s, Trippe made what seems to me an odd announcement: he said the 747 would be "a great weapon for peace, competing with intercontinental missiles for mankind's destiny". Uh, what? He compared a commercial airliner to ICBMs? I fail to see the connection. The type of guy he was, I guess he said weird stuff like that all the time.

The timeframe allowed to manufacture, assemble, test and produce the first prototype was staggering; the shortest time an airliner has ever been designed, even today. Three years, from conception in June 1966 to roll-out of the first prototype in 1969. No wonder these guys were called "The Incredibles"! Adding to the pressure on them, Boeing's two main rivals, struggling to get into the widebody game too, has their own designs in production. Lockheed were working on the L-1011 Tristar, while Douglas had gone for the DC-10, both aircraft ignoring the configuration of the 747's engines - four slung beneath the wing in pods, (as on the 707 and indeed the DC-8) with three engines in all, one each on the wing and one tail-mounted one, in the case of the DC-10, in a manner Boeing would certainly copy for their smaller 727, but which they assumed was not suitable for a large "jumbo" jet, while the Tristar opted for something similar, though its tail-engine was completely flush with the tail, unlike Douglas's effort, which stuck out. Oh, here, look below if you don't understand.

Lockheed L-1011 Tristar

McDonnell-Douglas DC-10

[Trollheart]

One unfortunate consequence of the overrun on budget as the 747 slowly made its way to reality was necessary cost-cutting exercises at Boeing, resulting in a massive 60,000 redundancies across the company. The project was, in fact, running the risk of bankrupting Boeing. September 30 1968 was designated as roll-out day, and in truth, though Boeing kept this date, the aircraft that rolled out of the hangar at Everett really more staggered out than rolled. Its engines were non-functioning at this point (as Pratt & Whitney were still working on how to provide the needed additional thrust to lift an aircraft whose laden weight had increased by over 1,000 lbs) and no usable landing gear, but the press must not be disappointed and this was all a P.R. exercise anyway, so the roll-out and christening ceremony went ahead as planned, and the Boeing 747 had officially been born.

After all the champagne had been smashed (and more, no doubt, drunk) and hands had been shaken, photographs taken and journalistic reports prepared, the real work began. To all intents and purposes, the aircraft which rolled out onto the tarmac in - for once - bright sunshine on the last day of September was a model: not a mock-up; this was the aircraft all right, but mostly it was an airframe, and much tinkering had to be done before it could fly. The ever-dependable Washington weather provided the worst possible conditions for test flight when the first Boeing 747 to take to the sky lifted off on February 9 1969. The test pilot, Jack Waddel, had been concerned about flying - and more importantly, landing - an aircraft whose flight deck was so high above the nose, and familiarised himself by having a mock-up built which he drove around the field, before he climbed into the cockpit of N7470 and raced her down the runway, pulling back on the stick to tilt the nose up as the first 747 climbed into the grey sky. It was a great relief for all concerned, as doubts had grown that such a heavy aircraft would not even make it off the ground and into the air. The first test flight lasted one hour and sixteen minutes, and the aircraft easily fulfilled its promise.

Seems odd to me that the man who basically shepherded the creation and development of the 747 was not there to see it take its maiden flight. Having retired from Pan Am, Juan Trippe had moved to the Bahamas, but William Allen, president of Boeing, had been visiting him when he got the news that the 747 was about to attempt its first flight. He was only seventy at the time, so you couldn't really say (unless he was sick, which there is no mention of) that he was too old to make the trip, and given the time and indeed money he had sunk into the project, you would imagine he would have wanted to have cadged a lift with Allen back to Everett to see his dream come to life. But no: he did not attend. Maybe, since he was no longer involved with Pan Am, he was not interested any more, or maybe he instinctively knew the 747 would fly without any issues. Still, you'd think he would have wanted to have been there.

Trippe had originally demanded the first of his new 747s be delivered to him by 1969, and this he got - or Pan Am got, as he was by this time retired - in April, Pan Am nodding back to their old Sikorsky flying boats and naming the new 747s as Clipper, a name which had been taken from the old sailing ships that used to ply the seas to China, and that would stick with them throughout their service. Other airlines' orders began to be fulfilled, and soon the Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet was a familiar shape in the sky, at airports, and was the aircraft to have in your fleet. Even today, more than fifty years after it first went into service, it's still flying, though this year (2022) saw the lowest number of orders of the airliner, with only three, half of the number from the previous year. Some of this, of course, has to be do with a general slow-down and fall-off of aviation due to Covid-19, but the reality sadly now is that the day of the 747, like that of the QE2, has passed, and people are not so much concerned now with luxury as with price. Wide bodied aircraft like the A330 and Boeing's own 777 and 787 have taken the place of the gargantuan liner, and only this year British Airways scrapped its entire fleet of 747s, the end of an era indeed.

But though its day is passed, and though the chances you will ever travel on one, if you never have, are very low indeed, the legacy of the Boeing 747 will be with us always. The dream, in the end, of a man who had little to do with aviation development but yet created the conditions for the emergence of such a behemoth at a time when others were thinking in completely different and opposing directions, the 747 became the queen of the skies, and proved that bigger was, for a very long time, better.

[Trollheart]

All right then, back to our timeline. Let's check out  how things progressed after balloons were the only real method of aviation in the world. In other words, let's explore the history of powered flight, which begins, well, further back than you might think.


Timeline: 15th - 16th century

If there's one thing guaranteed to bring a chuckle when you talk of early attempts at flight, it's the often catastrophic failures. I mean, who hasn't pissed themselves at that old silent movie of the bicycle under massive, massive wings that goes forward a few paces and then the wings collapse on it and it falls over? Well that was later, but consider the plight of one John Baptist Danti, who decided to do a kind of Icarus in reverse, way back at the end of the fifteenth century.

"One day when many distinguished people had come to Perugia for the wedding ceremony of Paolo Begliono; and were holding a festival in the main street; Danti suddenly jumped from a nearby tower using a rowing device with wings, which he had constructed in proportion to the weight of his body. He flew successfully over the market place, producing a fair amount of noise, and was watched by a large crowd. But when he had flown a distance of barely three hundred paces, an iron component on the left hand wing broke, so that he fell onto the roof of the Church of Maria delle Virgine, and was seriously injured."

You can't help but say it, can you?

No doubt the local Inquisition would say the hand of God had intervened and stopped poor old Danti from flouting the laws of nature, consorting with the Devil and so on. Nothing like a good old-fashioned impalement to put a stop to that nonsense! The dawning of the new century did nothing to dampen the fervour, or indeed good sense or logic, of those who wished to fly, as another Italian, John Damian, decided the best way to overtake an ambassador on his way to France, for some reason, after his installation as Abbot in Edinburgh was to fly, and never mind the trifling detail that man had not yet managed to do this successfully. Perhaps he would be the first to do so.

He would not.

Completely failing to achieve any height, he plummeted straight down from the battlements of Stirling Castle, smashed into the ground but luckily only sustained minor injuries. He blamed his failure not on his lack of aeronautical knowledge or experience, but on - wait for it - the fact the he had used hen's feathers in his wings. Well of course! The hen feathers, being from a barnyard bird rather than one that flew through the sky, had been attracted back down to the ground, thwarting his attempt to break the surly bonds of earth and punch the face of God. Whether or not any hens were hurt in the attempt is not recorded, but our John certainly was, breaking his thighbone, though he may consider himself lucky that's all he broke. Meanwhile, the ambassador presumably proceeded on his way, boringly using the banal transportation method every other sane person of the time was using, a ship.

1540 saw yet another John (alright, Joao, but I think it's a Spanish version of the name), this time in Portugal, perhaps the first attempt at flight in that country? Obviously taking the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, the first man I believe in the world to truly study and understand - if incorrectly - the principles of flight, though he never built any  machines and certainly never flew -  as his yardstick, Joao Torto built a kind of winged structure which he strapped to his back in order to enable him to make his flight. He then announced his intention: "I proclaim to all the inhabitants of this city that before this month comes to an end, a very great miracle will be seen, in the form of a man who will fly with magic wings from the clock tower of the cathedral towards Matthew's Fields."

Seems his flight actually worked - for about a few seconds, until the hood he had seen fit to wear (painted with an eagle's beak) slipped and obscured his vision. With no way to see where he was going, and unable to move his hands to the hood as they were strapped into the wings, down he went, crashing into the roofs below. Luckily for him, he was not seriously injured. This did not stop another cleric, a monk called Kasper Mohr (should have had Mohr sense, sorry sorry) from attempting something similar, but in his case his superiors stopped him in time, just as he was about to jump from the roof of the monastery. "Oh no you fucking don't, son!" they snapped, dragging him back. "Consider the birds of the air, and leave the flying to them. Haven't you manuscripts to illuminate or something?"

You couldn't even say attempts at flight were in their infancy in the sixteenth century, more a sort of embryonic stage, where people who should have known better, but didn't, attempted to do things they couldn't possibly hope to achieve, with virtually no working knowledge of the mechanics that were supposed to launch them triumphantly into the sky, but more often than not just caused them to plummet painfully to the earth. Some successful flights were claimed, but there's no backup for any of these, so we can assume either they were exaggerating or outright lying, probably knowing their accounts could not be disproven.

I mean, you have the French locksmith (huh?) Besnier, who claimed he had completed several successful flights with his stick-on bird wings, but when he sold these to another eager aviator the guy died on his first attempt. Who corroborates Besnier's account? What proof was offered the luckless and presumably gullible showman who bought the wings from him? And what of Allard, the tightrope walker who promised King Louis XIV he would fly, but instead dove straight down and came a cropper in front of the Sun King? This kind of nonsense, you'll be amused to hear, continues on into the next century.

Timeline: 17th century

It's an odd dichotomy to me that the larger percentage of men (always men, of course) who attempted to fly were men of the cloth; considering how the Church frowned on any such activity, you would think its adherents and officers would have kept away from such blasphemy. But again we have a cleric, this time a friar, possibly thumbing his nose at God, certainly at the authorities of the Church. What's the difference between a friar and a monk, you ask? Apparently monks tended to stay in the country, and on desolate islands, sort of thing, whereas your friar was a more urban sort of guy, hanging out in towns and cities. Neither, I have it on good authority, are usually to be found in the air. Anyway, this one, Friar Cyprian, is supposed to have not only tried but succeeded in flying with wings strapped to his body, though no proof is of course offered and there were no witnesses. But even so, the Church weren't standing for that, oh no.

The Bishop of Nyitra is recorded, probably, as saying "Let's see if that fucker can fly without his wing contraption, the heretic!" and sent his people to torch them. It seems the good friar got off being torched himself, but that may have been more to do with the political structure in Hungary than any leniency on the part of the Church.

Very interestingly, just as the history of ballooning involved Italians heavily, it's an Italian we look back to as the first inventor of what could be called any sort of an aeroplane, and no, I don't mean Leonardo. Though he designed models, he never built anything that I can see, and certainly never flew, so while in some ways he could be considered the father - or at least, great-grandfather - of flight, he doesn't figure in the actual history of aviation. The first man to successfully transport a living creature in a powered vehicle, other than a balloon (which is only powered, in the end, by the wind, and not really capable of being steered or directed) was this guy. Though to be fair, it wasn't a man he managed to fly. Nor was it really a powered flight.

Tito Livio Burattini (1617 - 1681)

A nobleman who was born in Italy but spent most of his working life in Poland and Lithuania, and when called to the court of the Polish king in 1641, he built a four-winged glider, which is said to have lifted a cat (why is it always a cat? Maybe because they're smaller and less excitable than dogs?) into the air, and presumably returned it to the ground safely. He was then given permission to build a full-size model, which would carry three men and no cats and would, he said, traverse the distance from Warsaw to Constantinople in just twelve hours. All that remains of it though is this sketch of a "flying dragon", which he drew in his treatise entitled Il volare non e impossibile, which even I can translate.


A man given the perhaps grandiose title of the Father of Aeronautics was again Italian, a priest living in Lombardy, who sketched out and designed what was called a vacuum airship. That's him below.

Francesco Lana de Terzi (1631 - 1687)

Although he is known also for the development of a reading system for blind people, known today as braille, de Terzi was the first to propose the idea of a vacuum airship, and his drawings make it clear that if anything looked like what it sounds, this did exactly what it said on the tin. Or would have, had it ever been built. And flown. Remaining though on the drawing board, you can see below how it literally looks like some sort of sailing ship making its way through the sky. It has the gondola, the mast, even the sail, but it operates (or would, or does in theory) on a wholly different principle to both balloons and later airships. Whereas an airship or dirigible is essentially a big balloon, with air - either hydrogen or helium - pumped into it to inflate it and keep it afloat, de Terzi's idea worked on a principle of air being removed. How? Glad you asked.

See those big balloons there either side of the sail? Yeah that's what I thought too, but they're not balloons. They are in fact large copper spheres, from which the air has been - in theory - pumped out, leaving a vacuum inside. As this vacuum is then lighter than the air, it provides lift, and de Terzi calculated that the airship would transport six people. Without an engine of any kind, I suppose really it has to be considered more a high-tech (for the time) balloon, with no real way of steering against the wind, but because the kind of copper required for the spheres was not yet available - and has yet to be - the airship could not be built.

There was another reason though, a darker one. De Terzi, certainly a man ahead of his time, and coming from a country split into constantly warring city-states, knew the potential such a device had to be misused by the military as a weapon, as he wrote "God will never allow that such a machine be built...because everybody realises that no city would be safe from raids...iron weights, fireballs and bombs could be hurled from a great height". Oh, surely not, Signor de Terzi!

An odd postscript to this is that today, four hundred years later, scientists, engineers and aviation enthusiasts are still grappling with the idea of a vacuum airship, and despite better materials being available then ever were to the Italian seventeenth-century Jesuit, the probability that such a device will ever be made, much less fly, seem as remote now as they were back then. Some things, I guess, just are not meant to be, and the passage of time can make very little difference.

Pinning down an actual aviation pioneer in the seventeenth century though seems hard, if not impossible. Like many great men of the time, people like Robert Hooke and Giovanni Borelli were interested in the idea of flight, but this seems to have been more a casual fancy, a diversion from their many other scientific pursuits, and so it is not really until the eighteenth century that we find people actually grappling with the problem in a serious way, devoting some energy, effort and intelligence to its solution.

Some guy called Hezarfen Celebi was supposed to have flown from a tower in Galatia to Scutari, a distance of several kilometres, but surely if he had done, this miracle would have been in all the pamphlets and woodcuts, or cried by the town crier in every town, or whatever way they communicated news back then? 1742 saw the Marquis of Bacqueville give it a go with the tried-and-not-trusted wings stuck to the body deal, but he had the misfortune to jump off a roof which overlooked a river, which should have been a relatively soft landing for him in the event/certainty of failure. Just his bad luck then that a barge was passing as he leaped, and he crashed right onto its deck, smashing both his legs in the process. Ouch! Shouldn't have touched that one with a ten-foot... okay, okay.


Bartolomeu de Gusmão (1685 -1724)

Although he was more concerned with airships, and we've already done balloons and indeed dirigibles, I think airships merit being included in powered flight, as they certainly were directable and had engines and navigational equipment. You didn't just climb into an airship and trust to the winds: the pilot could go against the prevailing currents of the air, so in effect I think you could say that airships were the true forerunners of aircraft, and this guy was one of the first to really take on the idea of designing and flying one.

As I've said before, you wouldn't really expect a priest to be thinking about man flying, would you? Surely more the type of man who would have said if God had meant us to fly he would have given us wings. But be that as it may, de Gusmão was a Portuguese priest born in Brazil, a Jesuit who in 1709 secured the patronage of the King of Portugal to design and test an airship, which was of course far different to what we know as one today. Like most of the inventors, scientists, thinkers and designers from about the sixteenth century to the eighteenth, de Gusmão envisioned his airship as being built around a kind of small boat, creating a sort of cradle in which the pilot would sit, with a large sail pulled over it like a massive parachute. Air would be pumped through bellows into hollow tubes with magnets acting as - you know what? I have no idea how this was supposed to fly, but here's a drawing of what it was supposed to look like.

For whatever reason, the public demonstration of his airship, which he christened Passarolla, never took place. Nevertheless he became a favourite with the king, who fired him out of a cannon, sorry, appointed him a canon and later made him the royal Chaplain. He also granted him an early version of a patent, though the penalties for copying his machine seem to have been a bit more stringent than they would today!

"Agreeable to the advice of my council, I order the pain of death against the transgressor, And, in order to encourage the suppliant to apply himself with zeal towards improving the machine which is capable of producing the effects mentioned by him, I also grant unto him the first vacancy in my College of Barcelona, with the annual pension of 600 000 reis during his life."

Right. So if you fuck with my boy's patent, you're literally going to lose your head. Talk about a cut-throat business practice! Sorry. Anyway de Gusmão also had some odd idea about making a sailing ship of the air, using a triangular gas-filled pyramid, but he died without making progress of any sort on this design. Of course, you could always rely on the Church to cry heresy when any such experiments were undertaken, and there is - uncorroborated - evidence that the Portuguese Inquisition (nobody expects the Portuguese Inquisition! Literally, nobody. Spanish, yes. Italian, maybe. Portuguese? Never 'eard of it, mate) came after him and that he had to flee to Spain (not in his airship of course). Whatever the truth of that, he died soon afterwards, in 1724, fifteen years after his non-demonstration and a few months short of his fortieth birthday. They named an airport in Brazil after him, but it got renamed in 1941, so they named another one after him, and so it stands today.

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688 - 1722)

Another who drew but did not create a flying machine, Swedenborg was happy to let future inventors sort out the nuts and bolts and get the thing flying. He wrote "It seems easier to talk of such a machine than to put it into actuality, for it requires greater force and less weight than exists in a human body. The science of mechanics might perhaps suggest a means, namely, a strong spiral spring. If these advantages and requisites are observed, perhaps in time to come some one might know how better to utilize our sketch and cause some addition to be made so as to accomplish that which we can only suggest. Yet there are sufficient proofs and examples from nature that such flights can take place without danger, although when the first trials are made you may have to pay for the experience, and not mind an arm or leg."

One of his quotes - not actually his but one he made use of, presages the clever clogs in the 19th century who claimed that "everything that can be invented has been invented" when he pleaded for a modicum of hope and restraint of hubris: "The art of flying is hardly yet born. It will be perfected and some day people will fly up to the moon. Do we pretend to have discovered everything, or to have brought our knowledge to a point where nothing can be added to it? Oh, for mercy's sake, let us agree that there is still something left for the ages to come!"

Swedenborg clearly had not the first clue how to solve the problem of flight, but had sketched out what he thought might be a neat idea, with a man seated in a sort of basket, where the pilot was supposed to sit, and operate large paddles attached to the one wing, which would move the machine through the air. Like many designs before and after it, Swedenborg's flying machine seems to have taken the idea of the mechanics of bird flight as its yardstick, which is not surprising. Birds do move through the air by beating their wings, but it would later be conclusively proven that this could not be emulated by humans, and that the only way to fly would be to use the air currents and more or less glide, until the engine was invented.