This edited article about Pilatre de Rozier originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 699 published on 7 June 1975.

The Marquis d’Arlandes and Pilatre de Rozier make their balloon ascent watched by the French Dauphin, by Wilf Hardy

Who was the first man to fly?

Well, that depends on what you mean by flying. Anybody can make a pair of wings and then jump off a roof – if he’s crazy enough!

Throughout history people have tried to imitate the birds, but until the year 1783 most of them broke something – legs or necks. Flying does, after all, mean having some control over where you’re going, at least up and down if not side to side.

Man’s past is full of strange stories of wizards and wise-men who flew in one way or another. Many of them probably have a tiny grain of truth in them, hidden under all the devils, demons and magic. Most famous of all these mythological ‘pioneers’ were two Ancient Greeks, Daedalus and his son Icarus with their wings of feathers and wax. But as Daedalus warned;

My boy, take care
To wing your course along the middle air:
If low, the surges wet your flagging plumes;
If high, the sun the melting wax consumes.

Unfortunately Icarus didn’t take his father’s advice; the sun melted the wax in his wings and he fell into the sea.

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This edited article about Wernher von Braun originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 690 published on 5 April 1975.

Saturn-5 rocket, designed by Wernher von Braun for America’s Apollo space program

The police were not pleased and his father was furious, but the 12-year-old boy simply couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. He had merely tied six large rockets on the back of his coaster wagon, and lit them.

True, the wagon had proceeded to roar down the road trailing fire, with the boy in hot pursuit. True, pedestrians had been terrified, but no damage had been done. Fortunately, also, the boy’s father was a baron, so when he had guaranteed that young Wernher would behave himself in future, and never again play with rockets, the police dropped the charges.

But Wernher von Braun had no intention of giving up rockets, which is why years later the Americans were the first to land on the Moon.

The story of Wernher von Braun, born in Germany in 1912, reads more like fiction than fact. Today he is a great American hero, but even now many Britons, who remember his terrible V-2 rockets are not so enthusiastic about this naturalised American genius as the people of the United States, who were never on the receiving end of the nightmare weapons.

It is understandable that there are those who still cannot forgive him. But the destruction of cities was not part of von Braun’s original dream. In 1932, a certain Captain Dornberger was ordered to develop rockets secretly for the German army. It was the year before Hitler’s Nazi party came to power, and the captain decided to enlist the aid of a small Society for Interplanetary Travel, a happy group of madmen – or so it seemed – who were dreaming of trips to Mars.

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This edited article about Peter Twiss originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 690 published on 5 April 1975.

A picture history of the Air Speed Record

To Peter Twiss, it was a routine test flight. His powerful V-winged Fairey Delta-2 turbo-jet was flying at 30,000 feet over southern England.

For weeks, he had put his plane through its paces. Day after day, he had checked and re-checked it, recording stresses and strains and reporting every quirk and flying characteristic to the designers. How could he know that this particular day in 1954 was to be any different to the others?

As he flew, Twiss’s eyes were on the needle of the fuel gauge, and he watched with fascination as it swung slowly from full to empty in a matter of seconds.

He half-hoped that the cause was a fault in the gauge, but when the warning light flashed on, his worst fears were confirmed.

More than one heart missed a beat at the home base at Boscombe Down when Twiss reported the fault by radio. He was given a course that would bring him home, but nobody knew if he would get there with his turbo-jets silent and his plane virtually a glider.

Twiss debated whether to use his ejector seat to shoot clear of the plane and float to earth by parachute. But that would leave the plane to crash where it willed, perhaps on a town or village. Finally, Twiss reckoned that he had just enough height to glide to his base.

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This edited article about aviation originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 680 published on 25 January 1975.

Various historic and modern planes with different kinds of swept wings culminating in Concorde (bottom right) by Wilf Hardy

Ever since the Wright brothers conquered gravity with a heavier-than-air machine in 1903, men have been seeking ways of building better and faster aircraft. It is a far cry from the historic, chain-driven plane, in which Orville Wright flew for 12 seconds, more than seventy years ago, to the mighty jets of today. But the intervening years have been marked by many achievements which have brought aircraft to their present peak of perfection.

One of the most remarkable of these has been the introduction of swept wings. Early aircraft either had single or double layers of wings (biplanes or monoplanes) and while these created buoyancy they also limited the speed at which the plane could fly.

With the development of more powerful engines, the need arose for aircraft to be designed which could remain stable at very high speeds.

The swept wing was the answer to this. Sweepback, as the design is termed, minimises the effects of the shock waves that build up when an aircraft reaches the speed of sound.

Swept-back wings had been experimented with as far back as 1930, as can be seen from the shape of the Granger Archaeopteryx. During the Second World War, the Miles’ Dragonflies had swept wings or, to be more specific, a swept tail which was called a tandem wing.

Since the war, most high speed aircraft have been built with swept-back wings, and greater and greater speeds have been attained. Airliners which fly at over 600 miles an hour and bombers which whine through the heavens at twice the speed of sound are part of today’s aviation scene. Swept-back wings, allied to the aircraft’s overall design and the power of its engines, have made this achievement possible.

This edited article about aviation originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 892 published on 24 February 1979.

The Vickers Vimy making its record-breaking transatlantic flight with pilots Alcock and Brown in the cockpit, by Graham Coton

The wild and windswept North Atlantic always presented a challenge to early aviators, and the epic story of how two British fliers, Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Whitten Brown, became the first men to fly across it in June 1919 is well known. The machine in which they made the 3,032 km flight (1,890 miles) was a Vickers Vimy twin-engined bomber, one of the largest warplanes built for the Royal Air Force in World War I. However, the Vimy arrived on the scene too late to be used for combat purposes, and would probably not have achieved fame but for the record-breaking flights in which it was involved.

Not only did one of these sturdy biplanes beat the Atlantic, but another, flown by two brothers, Ross and Keith Smith, became the first machine to fly the 17,900 km journey from England to Australia in under 30 days. It accomplished a journey half way round the world in 28 days, landing at Darwin on December 10, 1919.

The machine selected to make the Atlantic crossing attempt was stripped of all its military equipment, and the weight this saved was taken up with extra fuel – 865 imperial gallons (3,932 litres) compared with the normal 516 gallons (2,346 litres).

Despite terrible weather conditions and icing problems, the Vimy made the crossing from Newfoundland to Ireland in 16 hours 27 minutes.

This edited article about aviation originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 878 published on 11 November 1978.

Louis Bleriot flies across the English Channel with the French destroyer, Escopette, in the distance

On the grassy slopes of North Fall Meadow, almost in the shadow of Dover Castle, you will find one of the world’s most unusual monuments, for instead of staring up, you have to look down at it. In fact it is a monument that is best seen from the air, which is appropriate when you consider that the flat, plane-shaped stone memorial let into the cliff turf commemorates the first aerial crossing of the English Channel by France’s Louis Bleriot, in 1909.

Bleriot’s flight was made only six years after the Wright brothers first-ever flight at Kitty Hawk, and a bare three years after Santos-Dumont’s 61-metre hop in Paris’s Bois de Boulogne. At the time, most Europeans still stubbornly believed that Santos-Dumont was the real pioneer of heavier-than-air flying, cheerfully ignoring the claims of his rivals across the Atlantic.

Today, when everyone accepts that the Wrights flew first, it seems hard to believe that they could have been ignored. Yet, logically, the first flight should have been in France.

At the turn of the century the idea of flying was something that had totally failed to catch the imagination of the American people. Even after that momentous day at Kitty Hawk, the story of the flight was largely ignored by American newspapers, because their editors were reluctant to publish a report of such an improbable happening.

When the Wrights finally demonstrated their machine to a party of reporters it failed to work properly, which naturally confirmed the public’s earlier doubts. Because of this mishap, Wilbur and Orville’s feat went largely unrecognised in their own country. Not surprisingly, news of it made even less of an impression overseas.

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This edited article about aviation originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 875 published on 21 October 1978.

The statue of John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown by Harry Green

Day and night, the big jets shuttle steadily between London Airport and Australia with a matter-of-fact efficiency that makes the other side of the world seem like next door.

But though the journey may be shorter, there is still something special about crossing the Atlantic, something that smacks of adventure and the thought that if anything does go wrong there are only cold grey waves waiting to receive you.

Nobody knew this better than John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown, whose bronze, flying suited figures, immortalised in sculpture, stare out over the Heathrow terminal’s queuing crowds. Their memorial has every right to stand where it does, for it was these two men who, 60 years ago, were the first to blaze the trail that the great jets follow across the Atlantic.

They were by no means the only ones to try. As long ago as 1914, a newspaper owner, Lord Northcliffe, offered a prize of £10,000 to the first to fly the Atlantic. With the primitive aircraft of the time the feat had seemed impossible, but flying progressed enormously under the pressure of World War One.

By 1919 such a flight was still a desperately risky undertaking. But there were plenty of battle-proved machines standing idle and veteran pilots who had grown used to risking their lives daily for a good deal less than £10,000. Soon Sopwith, Handley Page, Short and a number of American aircraft manufacturers were busy preparing machines for transatlantic attempts.

Captain John Alcock, just demobilized from the RAF, suggested to the firm of Vickers that they should lend him a plane in which to attempt the crossing. Vickers agreed to provide him with a Vimy, a twin engined bomber that was right up-to-date. Only 12 had been built before the end of the war had stopped production. Alcock was joined by a brilliant RAF navigator, Arthur Whitten Brown, and together they watched the Vimy as it was prepared with infinite care.

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This edited article about civil aviation originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 869 published on 9 September 1978.

The Bristol 167 Brabazon (top) was ahead of its time but never saw airline service, while the Saunders-Roe SR’45 Princess (bottom) was a gigantic failure. Pictures by Wilf Hardy

In the summer of 1964 an antiquated lorry was following the telegraph wires – there was no road – from Mersa Matruh to Siwa Oasis, deep in the Sahara Desert. It was a bright red lorry, abandoned by the Italian Army in World War Two, and in the back were six men going home from Cairo, and the lorry’s grinning mechanic named Isa.

In the cab sat the driver with a pistol on his hip, his co-driver, and a young English traveller who should not really have been there at all. At last the outlying palm trees of Siwa came shimmering through the heat-haze; but just then a steady drone was heard. It was the sound of the engines of a silver Ilyushin I1 14 which came overhead.

Isa climbed over the roof of the driver’s cab. Still grinning, his face appeared upside-down at the driver’s window. “Oil, good!” he yelled over the noise of the engine and pointed at the Ilyushin as it disappeared, undercarriage down, towards Siwa’s tiny airstrip just south of the oasis.

Some minutes later, Isa’s meaning suddenly dawned on the driver. The passengers in the I1 14 were almost certainly oilmen who had come to examine the geologically promising rocks of the Qattarah Depression.

There could hardly have been a more dramatic example of how desert communications have been revolutionized since World War Two. Even as the lorry bumped over the dusty desert, the representatives of the industry that drives almost all modern transport flew overhead in privileged luxury. The I1 14 was an outdated aeroplane even in 1964, but like many other rugged working aircraft, this twin-engined Russian plane had done much to open up the world’s more inaccessible areas.

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This edited article about civil aviation originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 868 published on 2 September 1978.

A BOAC Liberator was accidentally shot down by a British fighter, by Graham Coton

On 1st June, 1943, Flight 777 was flying south across the Bay of Biscay. At just before one o’clock in the afternoon, its radio operator, Cornelius Van Brugge, signalled Whitchurch in England that his Douglas DC3 belonging to KLM, the Royal Dutch Airline, was being followed. Then came his last desperate words – “I am being attacked by enemy aircraft. From G-AGBB to GKH, am attacked by enemy aircraft.”

Cannon shells from eight German Junkers Ju88s blew the unarmed airliner apart and four people fell from the plane as its blazing wreck plunged seawards.

Had there really been spies on board, as the Nazis claimed, or had one of Germany’s own spies mistaken a passenger named Alfred Chenhalls for Winston Churchill? The truth will probably never be known, though this particular tragedy made headlines. One of Britain’s most popular film actors, Leslie Howard, died in the crash.

The DC3 was Dutch, but carried a British registration because it was operated by an airline in exile. After the Germans conquered Holland, KLM based itself in England. It and Britain’s new international airline, BOAC, then flew a regular service to Lisbon, in neutral Portugal, where their crews rubbed shoulders with men from many other airlines, including Germany’s Lufthansa.

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This edited article about civil aviation originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 867 published on 26 August 1978.

Germany’s Focke-Wulf Condor by Wilf Hardy

The decade following World War One has been called the age of the great air races. Competitions like the Schneider Trophy encouraged the aero industries of many nations to experiment with new and daring ideas – ideas that were to influence the design of both military and civil aircraft. By the 1930s this age of air races was over. Flying was no longer a novelty: people had grown used to aircraft and air transportation.

Nevertheless, some governments – particularly those of Germany and Italy – were desperate to keep their people “air-minded”. The Nazis and the Fascists intended to have the most powerful air forces in the world, and for this they needed not only efficient aircraft industries, but also hundreds of young men eager to become pilots. Therefore, when someone suggested an ambitious air race from southern France to Damascus and back, in order to commemorate Lindbergh’s first solo flight across the Atlantic, Mussolini declared that Italy must win.

By August, 1937, the winners were roaring in, and the Italian dictator had every reason to be pleased. The race had been a walk-over for Italy. Five bright red Savoia Marchetti SM79Cs, each with three green mice painted on the fuselage, had floored the opposition by taking first, second, third, sixth and eighth positions.

Pilots Cupini, Paradisi and the Green Mice racing team had proved that Italy’s latest three-engined airliner was fast and reliable, but was it really an airliner? That same year another pilot demonstrated the SM79′s agility in Argentina by making four consecutive loops in the big aircraft – hardly a necessary attribute for an airliner. In fact, this particular SM79 had gone to Argentina to show its paces as a bomber.

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