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The Wright brothers, Orville Wright (August 19, 1871 – January 30, 1948) and Wilbur Wright (April 16, 1867 – May 30, 1912), were American aviation pioneers generally credited with inventing, building, and flying the world's first successful airplane. [3][4][5] They made the first controlled, sustained flight of an engine-powered, heavier ...
Invented. 1903; 121 years ago (1903) An airplane (North American English) or aeroplane (British English), informally plane, is a fixed-wing aircraft that is propelled forward by thrust from a jet engine, propeller, or rocket engine. Airplanes come in a variety of sizes, shapes, and wing configurations. The broad spectrum of uses for airplanes ...
Almost as soon as they were invented, aeroplanes were used for military purposes. The first country to use them for military purposes was Italy, whose aircraft made reconnaissance, bombing and artillery correction flights in Libya during the Italian-Turkish war (September 1911 – October 1912). In addition, the first warplane shot down in ...
The Wright Flyer (also known as the Kitty Hawk, [ 3 ][ 4 ]Flyer I or the 1903 Flyer) made the first sustained flight by a manned heavier-than-air powered and controlled aircraft—an airplane —on December 17, 1903. [ 1 ] Invented and flown by brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright, it marked the beginning of the pioneer era of aviation.
The pioneer era of aviation was the period of aviation history between the first successful powered flight, generally accepted to have been made by the Wright Brothers on 17 December 1903, and the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914. Once the principles of powered controlled flight had been established there was a period in which ...
A 1786 depiction of the Montgolfier brothers ' balloon. Early flying machines include all forms of aircraft studied or constructed before the development of the modern aeroplane by 1910. The story of modern flight begins more than a century before the first successful manned aeroplane, and the earliest aircraft thousands of years before.
A jet aircraft (or simply jet) is an aircraft (nearly always a fixed-wing aircraft) propelled by one or more jet engines. Whereas the engines in propeller-powered aircraft generally achieve their maximum efficiency at much lower speeds and altitudes, jet engines achieve maximum efficiency at speeds close to or even well above the speed of sound ...
Although the modern theory of aerodynamic science did not emerge until the 18th century, its foundations began to emerge in ancient times. The fundamental aerodynamics continuity assumption has its origins in Aristotle's Treatise on the Heavens, although Archimedes, working in the 3rd century BC, was the first person to formally assert that a fluid could be treated as a continuum. [1]