It's time for an afternoon rant and suddenly a vague thought about flying takes shape through the synapses of the brain. But not of flight of facy or the flight of feathered creatures but of people. And there it goes... Flying with the mind is one of the oldest human habits. Man has been flying with his mind for thousands of years until one gloomy October day in 1783 when the transition from mental to real flying finally took place and it was thanks to two brothers known as Montgolfier who, against the advice and forecasts of `well-intentioned` citizens and villagers - managed to soar into the heavens with the help of a lighter-than-air aircraft (known as a Balloon). The heavens, until then reserved for birds, angels and archangels - were finally open to human presence.
After 120 years of dominance by balloons and airships, the first heavier-than-air aircraft appeared on the scene, paving the way for what we know today as air transport. Especially aviation, because airships, or as the world likes to call them by their generic name, Zeppelins, ruled the skies during the early days of the airplane. Basically huge bags filled with hydrogen, slow and cumbersome, they were the way aviation reached its first customers who needed faster travel than by train or ship. Perhaps the most revolutionary form of transport ever to appear is air transport. The speed and range, combined with relative comfort and unparalleled safety, put this form of transport in a whole new category.
Officially in 1903 and the Wright brothers, unofficially in 1901 and Gustav Weisskopf, the realization of the age-old dream of humanity to soar into the sky without any religious connotations began. The speed of development of civil aviation is spectacular. Only less than a decade after the first official flight of an airplane in the world, in 1911 - the French pilot and designer Louis Bleriot built the first purpose-built passenger aircraft with a closed cabin for four passengers, the Bleriot-24.
In 1913, the first multi-engine passenger aircraft of Igor Sikorsky appeared, called the Roskiy Vityaz only as a stepping stone towards the first serially produced passenger aircraft `Ilya Muromets` which carried 16 passengers in a comfortable cabin, but the tsarist bureaucrats had no idea about the new miracle of technology and the eventual opening of an airliner. Later, the aircraft was converted into a bomber and used on the Eastern Front during the Great War.
The end of World War I left hundreds of heavy bombers no longer in service and thousands of pilots out of work. Ambitious pioneers on both sides of the Atlantic saw the opportunity to create a new type of transport, the first airlines were founded, military aircraft were converted into passenger or postal aircraft and a huge number of pilots found work. Later, the first ``flight attendants`` appeared, initially men, later women. British pilots Alcock and Brown in 1919 were the first to fly across the Atlantic in a Vickers Vimy adapted bomber (no, Charles Lindbergh was not the first) thus indicating the possibility of intercontinental travel. The passenger plane E-4 of the Zeppelin-Stacken company from 1919 is one of those products that was so ahead of its time that the then world was confused and failed to find a suitable purpose for it. Of course, the fact that Germany was in chaos at the time didn't help at all...
Airports at that time were just slightly flatter meadows than usual, with few concrete or asphalt runways, which limited the use of aircraft in bad weather. This situation gave rise to the golden age of seaplanes, gigantic machines for transoceanic flights that could carry more passengers than their land-based competitors and could land at any port.
Later, as a result of the massive construction of asphalt and concrete airports during World War II, seaplanes gradually disappeared from the routes, giving way to increasingly sophisticated passenger airliners. From that era, it is also worth mentioning the legendary Douglas DC-3 (also known by its military designation C-47 Dakota), ubiquitous with its simple elegance, ease of maintenance and the general sympathetic impression it leaves on everyone, from a savage in the rainforests of New Guinea who founded a new religion (Cargo Cult) because of the twin-engine `Dakota`, considering it a deity (!?) to the rank and file who were professionally engaged in flying. Dozens of examples still fly on regular routes or serve as military transports around the world today, some eighty years after the flight of the first prototype.
With the arrival of the jet age and the British De Havilland Comet in 1949, the time required for travel was halved. Routes that would have taken weeks and months to travel by ship began to be covered in a few hours or at most a day, things unthinkable before the advent of flying machines. From then until today, there have been several directions in which passenger aviation has moved. The first is an increase in the number of passengers, larger and more spacious aircraft are being built, the Boeing B-747 and today's Airbus A-380 represent the pinnacle in this regard.
The second is economy, new turbofan engines with lower consumption are being introduced, the wing profiles and ``winglets'' on the wing tips play a role in reducing fuel consumption, and low-cost companies also enter the scene, which usually have a uniform fleet of one type of aircraft (Ryan Air uses exclusively B-737s for example) saving on everything and landing at secondary airports. The third is the safety of the flight where excellent results have been achieved and today this type of transport is the safest on the planet, in terms of kilometers traveled vs. victims.
The fourth is the speed where unfortunately there are no major changes, the level is still at the aforementioned Comet from the post-WW2 period, the only aircraft - the exception was the Franco-British Concorde, a supersonic aircraft that flew on regular routes at 2,200 km per hour. Arguably the sexiest thing in the world aside from a woman, this pearl of applied design and triumph of aerodynamics was withdrawn from service in 2003.
And that would be almost three centuries after the first idea for air travel. Air transport was first conceived by a fugitive Portuguese priest in 1709. It ended up in a madhouse, which was an expected reaction of the world at the time regarding flying anything unforeseen by the deities on duty. The blueprints of his airship still exist, and his tragic fate was only the first victim on the path to a new world whose contours were vaguely outlined in the priest's ingenious head...
(Roger Mortis, 123)
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