History of Flying

The Very Beginning

The history of flying stretches back far further than most people realise. Long before the Wright Brothers lifted off at Kitty Hawk in 1903, or the Montgolfier Brothers sent a sheep, a rooster and a duck aloft in a hot air balloon in 1783, human beings were dreaming about flight and trying to understand it.

Ancient Greek legend gives us Daedalus and Icarus, who constructed wings from feathers and wax to escape imprisonment by King Minos. Icarus famously flew too close to the sun, the wax melted, and he fell into the sea. Persian and Greek mythology also describes kings and conquerors being carried through the skies by eagles or griffins. These stories reflect a deep, persistent human fascination with flight that has never really gone away.

Early practical attempts to fly were mostly inspired by birds. Inventors attached artificial wings to their arms and jumped from towers or hillsides. None of them succeeded, and many were seriously hurt. The fundamental problem was anatomical: human arms simply do not have the muscle mass to generate lift for the whole body. It took centuries before engineers stopped trying to imitate birds directly and started analysing the underlying principles instead.

Early Pioneers

Leonardo da Vinci was one of the first to approach flight methodically. In the 1480s he produced hundreds of detailed drawings exploring how flight might work, including a design for an ornithopter, a machine with flapping wings. It was never built, but his sketches of rotor mechanisms influenced the eventual development of the helicopter.

By the late nineteenth century, progress accelerated. Otto Lilienthal, a German engineer, published the first serious book on aerodynamics in 1889 and made over two thousand glider flights before dying in a glider crash in 1896. His data was studied carefully by the Wright Brothers. Samuel Langley demonstrated that a small steam-powered model aircraft could fly nearly a mile in 1896, proving the concept of powered flight, though he never managed to scale the idea up successfully.

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The Wright Brothers and What Followed

Orville and Wilbur Wright were bicycle makers from Ohio who approached the problem of flight with unusual rigour. They built their own wind tunnel, tested dozens of wing shapes, and developed a reliable system of control before they ever attempted a powered flight. On 17 December 1903 at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville made the first controlled, sustained, powered flight in a heavier-than-air machine. The Flyer covered 120 yards in 12 seconds.

Within a decade, aircraft were being used in the First World War. The pace of development was extraordinary: aircraft that could barely stay airborne in 1903 were flying combat missions, dropping bombs, and engaging in aerial battles by 1914.

The Golden Age

The interwar years produced some of aviation's most celebrated figures. Alcock and Brown made the first non-stop transatlantic crossing in June 1919, landing in a bog in Connemara after 16 hours in the air. Charles Lindbergh completed the first solo transatlantic flight in 1927. Amy Johnson flew solo from England to Australia in 1930. Amelia Earhart crossed both the Atlantic and the English Channel.

Airships briefly seemed like the future of long-distance travel. The Graf Zeppelin completed a round-the-world voyage in 1929, but the destruction of the Hindenburg by fire in 1937 effectively ended public confidence in airship travel.

Frank Whittle patented the jet engine in 1930. By the time the Second World War began, aviation technology was advancing faster than at any previous point in history.

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Modern Aviation

Since 1945, commercial aviation has become routine. Concorde entered service in 1976 and flew transatlantic passengers at twice the speed of sound until 2003. Today, Airbus and Boeing dominate commercial aircraft manufacturing, and the industry carries over four billion passengers a year. Research now focuses heavily on sustainable aviation fuels and electric or hydrogen propulsion, driven by the need to reduce carbon emissions.

What This Means If You Want to Learn to Fly

All of that history leads directly to what is available to you today. In the UK, the main licence options for private pilots are:

• The Light Aircraft Pilot Licence (LAPL), which requires a minimum of 30 hours of flight training and a LAPL medical. It allows you to fly single-engine aircraft within Europe carrying up to three passengers.
• The Private Pilot Licence (PPL), which requires a minimum of 45 hours and a CAA Class 2 medical. It gives broader privileges and is recognised internationally.

Both require you to pass nine CAA theory exams covering subjects including air law, navigation, meteorology, and aircraft performance. Realistic total costs for a PPL in the UK currently range from around £10,000 to £15,000 depending on location, aircraft type, and how quickly you progress. The LAPL is generally somewhat cheaper given the lower minimum hours.

If you want to fly professionally, a Commercial Pilot Licence (CPL) or the frozen Airline Transport Pilot Licence (ATPL) route requires a CAA Class 1 medical and considerably more training hours. The integrated ATPL programmes can cost upwards of £100,000.

The mechanics of flight have not changed since the Wright Brothers first worked them out. The licences, the medical standards, and the training routes have been refined considerably, but the basic act of learning to fly remains much the same challenge it always was, and the satisfaction of a first solo flight is no less remarkable for it.

The Next Step

Now that you have read through the advice above, you might want to put it into practice. Our Pilot Training Cost Calculator lets you work out what learning to fly really costs: get a realistic UK estimate for your licence, broken down into flight hours, instruction, exams, medical and test fees, so there are no surprises. Try it now →