Having made aviation history in 1903 when their Wright Flyer completed the first successful heavier-than-air powered flight, the Wright brothers travelled to France to show off their ‘flying machine’ to an excited French public.
To prove their mastery of the skies some pilots took enormous risks to go higher, faster and longer. Aviators at an airshow in Blackpool in 1909 thrilled spectators with world record attempts in their biplanes and monoplanes.
In the same year a French pilot, Louis Blériot, made history as the first man to fly across the English Channel. His reward was a prize of £1,000 offered by the London Daily Mail.
By pushing the boundaries of powered flight, ‘flying men’ took great risks, some perishing as their flimsy aircraft tumbled spectacularly back to earth. Feeling there was a need for more safety equipment, Rudyard Kipling, a British author with a fascination for flight, designed a suit of pneumatic armour, the diagrams for which he sent to the Manchester Guardian.
One of the most daring flying stunts attempted in the UK was when a pilot landed on Helvellyn, a 950 metre (3,117 ft) high mountain in the Lake District. The dangerous feat took place in 1926, and a hiker who witnessed it was asked by the pilot to sign a piece of paper to confirm the landing had taken place.
Another landmark in aviation was achieved in 1933 when Mount Everest was ‘conquered from the air’.
A ‘splendid achievement’ was how this paper described American pilot Amelia Earhart becoming the first woman to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic in 1932. We also said: ‘she has succeeded in proving that the flight is not beyond the knowledge and the capacity for sustained endurance which a woman can acquire.’
