Wright Flyer
Twelve seconds in the air. Everything after this is a consequence.
- First flight
- 1903
- Ceiling
- 30 m
- Top speed
- 48 km/h
- On board
- 1
The pioneers
Pioneer
Wilbur & Orville Wright
1867 — 1912 · 1871 — 1948
Two bicycle makers who understood before anyone else that the hard part was not lifting off — it was steering.
Pioneer
Alberto Santos-Dumont
1873 — 1932
He flew over Paris in an airship, tied it up outside a café, and refused to patent anything he invented.
Santos-Dumont 14-bis
It flew backwards, tail first, in front of a Paris crowd — the first flight in Europe anyone was allowed to watch.
- First flight
- 1906
- Ceiling
- 6 m
- Top speed
- 41 km/h
- On board
- 1
Pioneer
Louis Blériot
1872 — 1936
He crossed the Channel in thirty-seven minutes and proved the sea was no longer a border.
Blériot XI
Wood, fabric, wire and a three-cylinder engine — and it flew over open water.
- First flight
- 1909
- Ceiling
- 1 000 m
- Top speed
- 76 km/h
- On board
- 1
Ilya Muromets
Four engines, a heated cabin, windows and an outside walkway — in 1913.
- First flight
- 1913
- Ceiling
- 3 000 m
- Top speed
- 110 km/h
- On board
- 5
The age of records
Rocket pioneer
Robert Goddard
1882 — 1945
A newspaper mocked him for believing a rocket could work in the vacuum of space. It printed a correction the day after Apollo 11 launched.
Spirit of St. Louis
Thirty-three and a half hours alone over the Atlantic, with no radio and no forward windscreen.
- First flight
- 1927
- Ceiling
- 3 000 m
- Top speed
- 215 km/h
- On board
- 1
Aviator
Charles Lindbergh
1902 — 1974
He left New York unknown and landed in Paris thirty-three hours later to a crowd of a hundred thousand people.
Pilot & writer
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
1900 — 1944
An Aéropostale mail pilot who wrote down what seeing the Earth from above does to a person. He took off in 1944 and never came back.
Chief designer
Sergei Korolev
1907 — 1966
His name stayed a state secret while he was alive. He sent up Sputnik, then Gagarin, and the world only learned who he was at his funeral.
Aviator
Jean Mermoz
1901 — 1936
He opened the mail route across the South Atlantic. Six years later his seaplane sent one last message and was never found.
Record pilot
Amelia Earhart
1897 — 1937
The first woman to fly the Atlantic alone. Five years later she vanished over the Pacific, and the search has never really stopped.
Tupolev ANT-25
In 1937 it crossed the North Pole non-stop, from Moscow all the way to the United States.
- First flight
- 1933
- Ceiling
- 7 850 m
- Top speed
- 246 km/h
- On board
- 3
Record pilot
Hélène Boucher
1908 — 1934
At twenty-six she broke speed records in every category, the men's included. Three months later she died on a training flight.
Douglas DC-3
The first airliner that could pay for itself carrying passengers alone. Some are still flying freight today.
- First flight
- 1935
- Ceiling
- 7 100 m
- Top speed
- 333 km/h
- On board
- 21
Designer
Andrei Tupolev
1888 — 1972
He designed more than a hundred aircraft — some of them from the prison workshop where he was held on invented charges of sabotage.
Designer
Igor Sikorsky
1889 — 1972
He built the first four-engine airliner in Russia, lost everything in the revolution, and started again in America — with helicopters.
The sound barrier
Sikorsky R-4
The first helicopter built in numbers. An aircraft that can stop in mid-air changes what rescue means.
- First flight
- 1942
- Ceiling
- 2 400 m
- Top speed
- 121 km/h
- On board
- 2
Test pilot
Chuck Yeager
1923 — 2020
Two broken ribs, a sawn-off broom handle to close the hatch, and the sound barrier fell on the first honest try.
Bell X-1
Shaped like a rifle bullet, because bullets were the only things known to go that fast.
- First flight
- 1947
- Ceiling
- 21 900 m
- Top speed
- 1 541 km/h
- On board
- 1
The dawn of space
Sud Aviation Caravelle
Put the engines at the tail and the cabin goes quiet. A French idea, copied by everyone.
- First flight
- 1955
- Ceiling
- 12 000 m
- Top speed
- 845 km/h
- On board
- 80
MiG-21
The most-produced supersonic aircraft in history. Sixty countries flew it, and some still do.
- First flight
- 1955
- Ceiling
- 17 800 m
- Top speed
- 2 175 km/h
- On board
- 1
Test pilot
Jacqueline Auriol
1917 — 2000
Rebuilt after a crash that took twenty-two operations, she came back as a test pilot and took the women's world speed record five times.
Dassault Mirage III
A delta wing drawn like an arrowhead, sold to twenty-one countries, and still the shape people picture when they hear the word fighter.
- First flight
- 1956
- Ceiling
- 17 000 m
- Top speed
- 2 200 km/h
- On board
- 1
Sputnik 1
A polished metal ball with four antennas, beeping. Anyone with a radio could hear the future arrive.
- First flight
- 1957
- Ceiling
- 939 km
- Top speed
- 28 800 km/h
- On board
- 0
Boeing 707
It cut the Atlantic crossing in half and made a plane ticket something an ordinary family could think about.
- First flight
- 1957
- Ceiling
- 12 800 m
- Top speed
- 1 000 km/h
- On board
- 189
North American X-15
Dropped from under a bomber's wing, it climbed past the edge of space and glided back. Eight of its pilots earned astronaut wings without ever riding a rocket.
- First flight
- 1959
- Ceiling
- 107 960 m
- Top speed
- 7 274 km/h
- On board
- 1
Cosmonaut
Yuri Gagarin
1934 — 1968
A foundry worker's son, twenty-seven years old, alone in a sphere for 108 minutes — the first human being to see the Earth whole.
Vostok 1
One orbit, no manual control, and an ejection seat for the last seven kilometres home.
- First flight
- 1961
- Ceiling
- 327 km
- Top speed
- 28 000 km/h
- On board
- 1
The Moon
Mathematician
Katherine Johnson
1918 — 2020
She computed orbital trajectories by hand. Before his flight, John Glenn refused to go until she had checked the machine's numbers herself.
Cosmonaut
Valentina Tereshkova
1937 —
A textile mill worker and amateur parachutist. In 1963 she spent three days in orbit — more flight time than every American astronaut before her, combined.
SR-71 Blackbird
It leaked fuel on the ground because it was built to expand in flight. Its escape manoeuvre from a missile was to accelerate.
- First flight
- 1964
- Ceiling
- 25 900 m
- Top speed
- 3 530 km/h
- On board
- 2
Cosmonaut
Alexei Leonov
1934 — 2019
First human to float outside a spacecraft. His suit ballooned so badly he had to bleed off air to fit back through the hatch.
Soyuz
Nearly sixty years in service and still flying crews to orbit — the longest-running spacecraft design in history.
- First flight
- 1967
- Ceiling
- 400 km
- Top speed
- 28 000 km/h
- On board
- 3
Saturn V
One hundred and eleven metres tall, burning fifteen tonnes of fuel every second. Nothing louder has ever been built on purpose.
- First flight
- 1967
- Ceiling
- 400 000 km
- Top speed
- 39 000 km/h
- On board
- 3
Tupolev Tu-144
Supersonic two months before Concorde, with retractable canards behind the cockpit that no western airliner ever had.
- First flight
- 1968
- Ceiling
- 18 000 m
- Top speed
- 2 300 km/h
- On board
- 140
Concorde
Paris to New York in three and a half hours, at the edge of space, with the sky going dark blue above the windows.
- First flight
- 1969
- Ceiling
- 18 300 m
- Top speed
- 2 179 km/h
- On board
- 100
Astronaut
Neil Armstrong
1930 — 2012
A test pilot first and last. He took manual control, flew past a boulder field, and landed with less than a minute of fuel left.
Boeing 747
The hump exists because the designers assumed supersonic jets would win and this one would end up hauling freight.
- First flight
- 1969
- Ceiling
- 13 700 m
- Top speed
- 988 km/h
- On board
- 524
Designer
Marcel Dassault
1892 — 1986
He drew aircraft for sixty years, from wooden propellers to the delta wing. The Mirage and the Rafale both descend from his pencil.
Lunokhod 1
The first rover on another world, driven from Earth by five people sitting in a room in Crimea.
- First flight
- 1970
- Ceiling
- 384 400 km
- Top speed
- 0,1 km/h
- On board
- 0
Supersonic
Voyager 1
Launched before most people reading this were born, it left the solar system and still calls home once a day.
- First flight
- 1977
- Ceiling
- 25 milliards km
- Top speed
- 61 000 km/h
- On board
- 0
Ariane 1
Europe decides it will no longer ask anyone's permission to reach orbit.
- First flight
- 1979
- Ceiling
- 36 000 km
- Top speed
- 28 000 km/h
- On board
- 0
Space Shuttle
Launch like a rocket, come home like a glider — with no engines and exactly one chance at the runway.
- First flight
- 1981
- Ceiling
- 600 km
- Top speed
- 28 000 km/h
- On board
- 7
Astronaut
Jean-Loup Chrétien
1938 —
The first western European in space — and he got there on a Soviet rocket, in the middle of the Cold War.
Astronaut
Sally Ride
1951 — 2012
A physicist who answered questions about make-up on her way to becoming the first American woman in orbit, then spent her life teaching girls science.
Mir
A house in orbit, assembled module by module and lived in for ten unbroken years. Its name means both peace and world.
- First flight
- 1986
- Ceiling
- 390 km
- Top speed
- 27 700 km/h
- On board
- 3
The giants
International Space Station
Fifteen countries, two former rivals, and a permanently inhabited house that has passed over your head roughly sixteen times a day since 2000.
- First flight
- 1998
- Ceiling
- 408 km
- Top speed
- 27 600 km/h
- On board
- 7
Airbus A380
Eight hundred and fifty-three people in the sky at the same time, in a machine with a staircase.
- First flight
- 2005
- Ceiling
- 13 100 m
- Top speed
- 1 020 km/h
- On board
- 853
Falcon 9
In 2015 a rocket stage came back and landed upright. Everyone had agreed for fifty years that this was not worth trying.
- First flight
- 2010
- Ceiling
- LEO / GTO
- Top speed
- 28 000 km/h
- On board
- 0
Ingenuity
A 1.8-kilo helicopter that flew on Mars, where the air is a hundred times thinner. It was meant to make five flights. It made seventy-two.
- First flight
- 2021
- Ceiling
- 24 m
- Top speed
- 19 km/h
- On board
- 0