Pre-19th century

Louis-Sébastien Lenormand (France) is considered the first human to make a witnessed descent with a parachute. On December 26, 1783 he jumped from the tower of the Montpellier observatory in front of a crowd that included Joseph Montgolfier, using a 14 foot parachute with a rigid wooden frame.

Pilâtre de Rozier made the first trip by a human in a free-flying balloon (the Montgolfière): 9 kilometres (5.6 mi) covered in 25 minutes, 21 November 1783, near Paris.

Professor Jacques Charles and Les Frères Robert are known to have made the first unmanned flight of a hydrogen balloon, Le Globe on 26 August 1783, the first manned hydrogen balloon flight on 1 December 1783 and an elongated craft that followed Jean Baptiste Meusnier's proposals for a dirigible balloon, completed the first flight over 100 km from Paris to Beuvry on 19 September 1784, La Caroline.

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Th century

• Hans Andreas Navrestad, (Norway) Allegedly flew manned glider in 1825.

· First well-documented Western human glide was made in 1853 by an Englishman Cayley. He also made the first scientific studies into the aerodynamic forces on a winged flying machine and produced designs incorporating a fuselage, wings, stabilizing tail and control surfaces. He discovered and identified the four aerodynamic forces of flight - weight, lift, drag, and thrust. Modern airplane design is based on those discoveries including cambered wings. He is only one of the many called the "Father of aviation".

· First heavier than air powered flight was accomplished by John Stringfellow from England. In 1848, he flew a steam powered monoplane model of 10 feet (3.0 m) wingspan a few dozen feet at an exhibition at Cremorne Gardens in London.

· On 24 September 1852 Henri Giffard from France made the first powered and controlled flight, travelling 27 km (17 mi) from Paris to Trappes. It was the world's first passenger-carrying airship). Both practical and steerable, the hydrogen-filled airship was equipped with a 3 hp steam engine that drove a 3 bladed propeller.

Le Bris and his flying machine,.

· A Frenchman Jean-Marie Le Bris was the first to fly higher than his point of departure in 1856, by having his glider Albatros II pulled by a horse on a beach, against the wind.

· Matias Perez was a Portuguese pilot from Havana, canopy maker and Cuban resident who, carried away with the ever increasing popularity of aerostatic aircraft, disappeared while attempting an aerostatic flight from Havana's "Plaza de Marte" (currently Parque de la Fraternidad) on June, 1856.

· Jan Wnek controlled his glider by twisting the wing's trailing edge via strings attached to stirrups at his feet in 1866 - 1869.

· Félix du Temple de la Croix in France made the first take-off of a manned and powered aircraft, using a sloping ramp, resulting in a brief flight a few feet above the ground in 1874.

· First airplane to lift itself under its own power, the Aeroplane was an unmanned aircraft powered by a compressed-air engine constructed by Victor Tatin in France in 1879.

· John Joseph Montgomery, made the first controlled glider flight in the United States, from a hillside near Otay, California in 1883.

· Charles Renard aboard the dirigible "La France" made the first closed course circuit, length 7.6 kilometres (4,7 mi) near Chalais-Meudon, August 9, 1884.

· Alexander Feodorovich Mozhaiski made the first powered hop by a manned multi-engine (steam) fixed-wing aircraft, 60–100 feet (20-30 m), from a downsloped ramp in Russian Empire in 1884.

· Clément Ader from France reportedly made the first manned, powered, heavier-than-air flight of a significant distance (50 metres) but insignificant altitude from level ground in 1890 in his bat-winged, fully self-propelled fixed wing aircraft with a single tractor propeller, the Ader Éole. Seven years later, the Avion III is claimed to have be flown over 300 metres, just lifting off the ground, and then crashing. The event was not publicized until many years later, as it had been a military secret. The events were poorly documented, the aeroplane was not suited to be controlled and there was no further development.

· The German "Glider King" Otto Lilienthal was the first person (1891)to make controlled untethered glides repeatedly, and the first to be photographed flying a heavier-than-air machine. He made about 2,000 glides until his death on 10 August 1896 from injuries in a glider crash the day before.

· Chūhachi Ninomiya was a Japanese inventor who developed several small powered models including an early tailless aircraft in 1894.

· The Australian inventor of the box kite Lawrence Hargrave linked four of his kites together, added a sling seat, and flew 16 feet (4.9 m) in 1894. By demonstrating to a sceptical public that it was possible to build a safe and stable flying machine, Hargrave opened the door to other inventors and pioneers. Hargrave devoted most of his life to constructing a machine that would fly. He believed passionately in open communication within the scientific community and would not patent his inventions. Instead, he scrupulously published the results of his experiments in order that a mutual interchange of ideas may take place with other inventors working in the same field, so as to expedite joint progress.

· The American inventor of the machine gun Hiram Stevens Maxim built in the United Kingdom a very large 3.5 ton (3.2 t) flying machine that ran on a track and was propelled by powerful twin naphtha fuelled steam engines. He made several tests in the huge biplane that were well recorded and reported. On July 31, 1894 he made a record breaking speed run at 42 miles per hour (68 km/h). The machine lifted from the 1,800-foot (550 m) track and broke a restraining rail, crashing after a short uncontrolled flight just above the ground.

· The Sanskrit scholar Shivkar Bapuji Talpade designed an unmanned aircraft, supposedly based on Vedic technology in 1895. It is claimed that it took off before a large audience in the Chowpathy beach of Bombay and flew to a height of 1,500 feet.

· Samuel Pierpont Langley is the author of the first sustained flight by a heavier-than-air powered, unmanned aircraft in 1896: the Number 5 model, driven by a miniature steam engine, flew half a mile in 90 seconds over the Potomac River near Washington, D.C. In November the Number 6 flew more than five thousand feet.

· Octave Chanute designed the first rectangular wing strut-braced biplane (originally tri-plane) hang glider, a configuration that strongly influenced the Wright brothers, flown successfully at the Indiana shore of Lake Michigan, U.S. in 1896 by his protégés for distances exceeding 100 feet (30 m).

· Carl Rickard Nyberg from Sweden managed a few short jumps in his Flugan, a steam powered, manned aircraft in 1897.

· Pioneer British glider/plane builder and pilot Percy Pilcher, protege of Lilienthal, was killed in 1899 when his fourth glider crashed shortly before the intended public test of his powered triplane. Cranfield University built a replica of the triplane in 2003 from drawings in Philip Jarrett's book "Another Icarus". Test pilot Bill Brooks successfully flew it several times, staying airborne up to 1 minute and 25 seconds.

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Th century

· In 1901 Wilhelm Kress from Austria tested Drachenflieger, a tandem monoplane seaplane similar to Samuel Langley's Aerodrome, which made brief airborne hops but could not sustain itself.

· Reports of supposed flight by an aeroplane heavier than air propelled by its own motor (constructor - Gustave Whitehead) Whitehead No. 21 were published in the New York Herald, Bridgeport (CT) Herald, The Washington Times and nine other newspapers in 1901. The event was supposedly witnessed by several people, one of them a reporter for the Bridgeport Herald. The reporter wrote that he started on wheels from a flat surface, flew 800 metres at 15 metres height, and landed softly on the wheels. Aviation historians dismiss this flight; Charles Harvard Gibbs-Smith writes that the reported carbide- or acetylene-powered engine "almost certainly never existed".

· Whitehead claimed two flights on January 17, 1902 in his improved Number 22, with a more powerful engine and aluminium instead of bamboo. He claimed the flights took place over Long Island Sound and covered distances of about two miles (3 km) and seven miles (11 km) at heights up to 200 feet (61 m), ending with safe landings in the water by the boat-like fuselage. Aviation historians dismiss all of Whitehead's claims to powered flight.

· Americans Orville & Wilbur Wright completed development of the three-axis control system with the incorporation of a movable rudder connected to the wing warping control on their 1902 Glider. They subsequently made several fully controlled heavier than air gliding flights, including one of 622.5 ft (189.7 m) in 26 seconds. The 1902 glider was the basis for their patented control system still used on modern fixed-wing aircraft.

· Several people reportedly witnessed Richard Pearse’s powered flights including one in 1903 of over 100 ft (30 m) in a high-wing, tricycle undercarriage monoplane powered by a 15 hp (11 kW) air-cooled horizontally opposed engine in New Zealand. Flight ended with a crash into a hedgerow. Although the machine had pendulum stability and a three axis control system, incorporating ailerons, Pearse's pitch and yaw controls were ineffectual. (In the mockumentary Forgotten Silver, director Peter Jackson recreated this flight, supposedly filmed by New Zealand filmmaker Colin McKenzie. The film was so convincing, Paul Harvey reported it as genuine on his syndicated News and Comment program).

· In 1903 Karl Jatho (Germany) flew with his self-made motored gliding aircraft. He had four witnesses for his flight. The plane was equipped with a single-cylinder 10 horsepower (7.5 kW) Buchet engine driving a two-bladed pusher propeller and made hops of up to 200 feet (60 m), flying up to 10 feet (3.0 m) high.

· Orville & Wilbur Wright, (United States) made the first recorded controlled, powered, sustained heavier than air flight, in the Wright Flyer I, a biplane. In the day's fourth flight, Wilbur Wright flew 852 ft (260 m) in 59 seconds in 1903. First three flights were approximately 120, 175, and 200 ft (61 m), respectively. The Wrights laid particular stress on fully and accurately describing all the requirements for controlled, powered flight and put them into use in an aircraft which took off without the aid of a catapult from a level launching rail, with the aid of a headwind to achieve sufficient airspeed before reaching the end of the rail.

· Horatio Phillips (United Kingdom, 1904) experimented with slat-winged configured aircraft. It was a fully self-propelled, autonomous take-off fixed wing aircraft using an internal combustion engine and a single tractor propeller that included its own wheeled landing gear and modern looking tail empenage. It flew 50 feet. A later and larger version of the slat-wing flew 500 feet in 1907.

· First high altitude flights with Daniel Maloney as pilot of a tandem-wing glider designed by John Joseph Montgomery were made in 1905. The glider was launched by balloon to heights up to 4,000 feet (1,200 m) with Maloney controlling the aircraft through a series of prescribed maneuvers to a predetermined landing location in front of a large public gathering at Santa Clara, California.

· Wilbur Wright piloted Wright Flyer III in a flight of 24 miles (39 km) in 39 minutes (a world record that stood until Orville Wright broke it in 1908) and returned to land the plane at the takeoff site.

· Traian Vuia in Romania designed a fully self-propelled, fixed-wing monoplane aircraft using a carbonic acid gas engine and a single tractor propeller in 1906. He flew for 12 metres in Paris without the aid of external takeoff mechanisms, such as a catapult. The possibility of such unaided heavier-than-air flight was heavily contested by the French Academy of Sciences, which had declined to assist Vuia with funding.

· Jacob Ellehammer built a monoplane, which he tested with a tether on the Danish Lindholm island in 1906.

· The Aero Club of France certified the distance of 60 metres (197 ft); height was about 2–3 metres (6–10 ft) covered by Alberto Santos-Dumont’s plane. It was the winner of the Archdeacon Prize for first official flight of more than 25 metres.

· Jacques and Louis Breguet helicopter experiments resulted (with the advice of Charles Richet) in the Gyroplane No. 1 lifting its pilot up into the air about 60 cm (2 ft) for a minute in France in 1907. However, the flight proved to be extremely unsteady. For this reason, the flights of the Gyroplane No. 1 are considered to be the first manned flight of a helicopter, but not a free flight.

· In 1907, the Paul Cornu helicopter lifted its inventor to 30 cm (1 ft) and remained aloft for 20 seconds in France. It was reported to be the first truly free flight with a pilot.

· In 1910, the Fabre Hydravion "Hydroplane", an experimental floatplane designed by Henri Fabre (France), was notable as the first plane in history to take off from water under its own power.

· Juan de la Cierva (Spain) developed the articulated rotor which resulted in the world's first successful flight of a stable rotary-wing aircraft in 1923 with his fourth experimental autogyro.

Unit2

Text5

The 19^th Century

Some of the more credible developments in actual flight and stability occurred in the 19th century. British Sir George Cayley designed a combined helicopter and horizontally propelled aircraft, and British Francis Herbert Wenham used wind tunnels in his studies and predicted the application of multiple wings placed above each other. Another famous inventor was John Stringfellow, who designed a steam-engine powered aircraft. This model demonstrated lift but failed to actually climb. Lawrence Hargrave, a British-born Australian inventor, created a rigid-wing aircraft with flapping blades operated by a compressed-air motor; it flew 312 ft (95m) in 1891. A famous glider developer in the 19th century was Jean Marie Le Bris, a Frenchman who tested a glider with movable wings.

Kites also played an important role in the development of aviation: they could be used to test aerodynamics and flight stability. Lawrence Hargrave first created the box kite in 1893, and Alexander Graham Bell developed a gigantic passenger-carrying tetrahedral-celled kite from 1895 to 1910. Some of the most important full-scale model flight attempts were made by Samuel Langley, who created the first heavier-than-air, gasoline-powered engine which actually flew. The 'aerodrome', which he called it, was powered by a 53 horsepower 5-cylinder radial engine and later crashed into the Potomac river on December 1903 - days before the Wrights' historic flight.

Throughout this century, major developments would give inventors a sound basis in experimental aerodynamics, although stability and control required for sustained flight had not been acquired. Most importantly, inventors noticed that successful, powered flight required light gasoline engines instead of the cumbersome steam engines previously used.

Glossary to text 1:

blade climb crash credible   full-scale horsepower

лопасть набрать высоту разбиться заслуживающий доверия полномасштабный лошадиная сила

lift movable powered rigid throughout sound tetrahedral-celled

подъемная сила движущийся оснащенный двигателем жесткий на протяжении зд. прочный с ячейками в форме тетраэдров

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Glider aircraft are heavier-than-air craft that are supported in flight by the dynamic reaction of the air against their lifting surfaces, and whose free flight does not depend on an engine. Mostly these types of aircraft are intended for routine operation without engines, though engine failure can force other types of aircraft to glide. Some gliders have engines for extending their flights and some have engines powerful enough to launch.

There are a wide variety of types differing in the construction of their wings, aerodynamic efficiency, location of the pilot and controls. Some may have power-plants to take off and/or extend flight. Some are designed simply to descend, but the most common varieties exploit meteorological phenomena to maintain or even gain height. Gliders are principally used for the air sports of gliding, hang gliding and paragliding but are also used for recovering spacecraft. Perhaps the most familiar type is the paper plane.

Etymology

Glider is the noun form of the verb to glide. It derives from Middle English gliden, which in turn derived from Old English glīdan. The oldest meaning of glide may have denoted a precipitous running or jumping, as opposed to a smooth motion. Scholars are uncertain as to its original derivation, with possible connections to "slide", and "light" having been advanced.^[2]