Learning to Fly

Our jealousy of birds‘ ability to fly is almost as old as the history of mankind itself. Flight was and is regarded as a powerful instrument with an element of magic. Many a myth has been created around man-Gods who have the ability to fly. Mankind's fascination with flight runs like a thread through all of history.

Text: Robert Eberhardt | Illustration: Ana Melo

The universal idea of flight dates back to well before the technical era, which is why science has tried to explain it as a form of nostalgia that it argues is an essential trait of the human psyche. Even back in those times, when it was impossible to escape the earth’s surface by physical means, flight was the epitome of weightlessness that conquers anything mundane. Winged creatures are native to almost any culture on earth. Ancient Mesopotamian art depicts bulls, lions and horses with large wings as a testament to their God-like status. The symbol of the winged sun goes back to the Ancient Egyptian God of the sky - often depicted as a falcon - and was adopted by the Hettites, Assyrians and Persians.

Mercury, the messenger of the Roman gods, wore winged shoes and in his ars amatoria Ovid tells the tale of a father (Daedalus) and his son, Icarus, who try to escape imprisonment with the help of artificial wings. Icarus, ignoring his father’s instructions, however, falls to his death while Daedalus makes it to safety unscathed.

Magical Flights

The Early Middle Ages saw a hundred-year-long discussion about the reality of such magical flights. In the 14th century, Daedalus‘ flight was seen as a prefiguration of the Ascension of Jesus while Icarus became a symbol for abject passions and arrogance. The ways in which human flight was imagined ranged from ships passing through the clouds and witches‘ nightly adventures in the air to the visions of Roger Bacon and the detailed plans of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). The »flight on a broom« was a key criterion to be met to reach a judgement of burning at the stake in the witch trials of the early modern era – many of the women charged with witchcraft »confessed« to the mysterious art of flying as a result of torture.

The Wright Brothers

Before the times of aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal (1848- 1896), flying machines were thought to be impossible to steer. But he was the first to successfully complete a controlled gliding flight. While progress in human flight had been incremental at best so far, things changed with the invention of the Wright Brothers, which led to the first motorized flight in 1903. A mere six years later, Louis Blériot crossed the Channel and 10 years after the invention of motorized flight, the first easily manoeuvrable flying machines were used in air combat during World War I. Compared to the time period that had passed between man’s first longing gazes at birds in the skies and the first successful attempts at human flight, the development of these 10 years was positively rapid.

In 1918, the first air mail service routes were established in America. The year after, John Alcock (1892-1919) and Arthur Whitten-Brown (1886- 1948) were the first to cross the Atlantic on a non-stop flight, winning a sought-after competition. In 1924, two of four aircrafts successfully orbited the globe – only 20 years after the Wright Brothers' triumph. Charles A. Lindbergh completed the first solo transatlantic flight starting in New York and safely arriving in Paris 33 hours later – an achievement made even more impressive when you take into account that auto pilot had not been invented yet. Five years after Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart was the first woman to cross the Atlantic, covering the route in half the time it had taken Lindbergh. 1941 saw the take-off of the first jet aircraft, a technology which would be tested further during World War II.

Only a few years after that, the sound barrier was broken for the first time: Chuck Yeager reached supersonic speed in a Bell X-1, followed by a Tupolew 144 and the Concorde, two commercial supersonic aircrafts. In 1969, the year of the first moon landing, the Boeing 747 was presented to the public: the largest passenger plane in the world. It would hold

In 1924, two of four aircrafts successfully orbited the globe – only 20 years after the Wright Brothers' triumph."

this title until 2007 when the Airbus A380, providing room for 840 passengers, knocked it off the top spot after many decades. It was quipped that a whole village could now fly across the globe together – a utopic idea that hardly anyone would have believed a century earlier. Over the course of just one century, since the beginning of motorized flight, the world of aviation had changed completely. Almost any place in the world can now be reached within a few hours. And while a trip around the world was a privilege reserved for very few explorers and travellers, and always with significant effort and cost, a large part of the population can now travel the world thanks to commercial aircrafts. But unfortunately this also means that soaring above the clouds is no longer anything exclusive or even special. Arguments about the size of your carry-on luggage and who gets the last sandwich leave little room for the sublimity that used to be inherent in air travel. That‘s unless you are travelling by private plane, of course. In 2013, a total number of around 35.9 million flights took off around the world; in 2014 that number climbed to just shy of 37 million. In Germany alone, 105 million passengers were counted that year and the German Aerospace Centre estimates that this will rise to 175 million by 2030. Why doesn't anybody want to stay on the ground?

Why doesn't anybody want to stay on the ground?"