Global party marks 100 years of flight

AVIATION enthusiasts across Scotland joined global celebrations yesterday to mark the centennial of the first powered flight by the Wright brothers.

Glasgow Flying Club attempted to make 100 take-offs and 100 landings in a single aircraft; while, at Cumbernauld airport, a fragment of wing fabric from the brothers’ plane, the Flyer, was taken up in a microlight to mark the occasion.

The fragment of fabric, just one square inch, is owned by Colin Mackinnon, who trains people to fly microlights at the airport. He bought it in 1996, for £1,500, at Sotheby’s .

Mr Mackinnon said: "Man had dreamed of flying for thousands of years. People were looking for ways to go into the air and the Wright brothers were the ones to make it happen, and so to have some sort of connection with the first successful flight, it’s just magical."

In Cardross, however, as well as celebrating the anniversary, members of Glasgow University also remembered a Scots aviation pioneer who narrowly missed making the first powered flight four years before the Wrights.

Percy Pilcher, who made the UK’s first flight, in Scotland, built a powered triplane four years before the American brothers made the historic flight. Experts claim that the Glasgow University student would have beaten Orville and Wilbur Wright to successfully pilot the powered aircraft if he had not met an untimely death.

Yesterday, three microlights from the University of Glasgow and Strathclyde Air Squadron recreated Pilcher’s flightpath to pay tribute on the 100th anniversary of powered flight.

Dugald Cameron OBE, who has co-authored a new book, From Pilcher to the Planets, claims he was way ahead of his time and his rivals. He said that a recreation of Pilcher’s powered triplane proves that he would have successfully taken to the skies.

Professor Cameron said the plane, built to Pilcher’s exact specifications, made a successful flight earlier this year.

He added: "He was on the right lines and was certainly well on his way to doing it.

"Unfortunately he was killed in 1899 so the chance he would have gone further was removed.

"It is clear from the recreation that the aircraft flew very successfully with a number of modifications.

"I thought before the flight that he didn’t have enough power. But it has flown beautifully."

But the celebration of the Wright’s flight dominated events across the rest of the UK.

The Duke of Edinburgh opened the new Milestones of Flight exhibition at the Royal Air Force Museum in Hendon, north London. Also present at the ceremony was Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary .

In addition to the larger events, many flying clubs held "fly-out" events, with as many aircraft as they could muster taking to the skies to honour the centenary.

In the United States, however, an attempt to re-enact the flight at its site in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, which was attended by George Bush, the US president, was cancelled when torrential rain prevented a replica of the Flyer from taking off.

Reaching for the stars

THE end of the first one hundred years of air travel saw the demise of Concorde, one of aviation’s greatest icons. The retirement of the aircraft has cast a shadow over the future of commercial supersonic flight.

But aviation experts believe that the second century of flight will see it become increasingly democratised, with the establishment of private companies ferrying tourists into space, while executive jets will globetrot at supersonic speed.

At the moment, aviation experts believe that much of air travel’s promise is unfulfilled, and that the establishment of space travel as routine, along with the mass personal ownership of aircraft, is the ultimate aim.

"Aeronautics is not mature. We barely take advantage of it in our daily lives," claimed Mark Moore, one of NASA’s top thinkers on future flight. "We haven’t achieved the Wright brothers’ dream."

But space tourism is close to becoming reality. There already exists the X-Prize, which offers £5.7 million for the first company to privately build and launch a spaceship capable of carrying three people to an altitude of 100km.

According Peter Diamandis, who established the prize, there are already two dozen teams competing for it. He believes that it may be won next year and that commercial space flights will become a normal part of life.

"We’re on the verge of what you might call the golden age of space flight, where it will be possible for the general public to fly into space on a routine basis," he said.

For domestic air travel, aeroplane manufacturers are close to developing massive, "double-decker" jets. Airbus already plans to have an aircraft capable of carrying 600 people by 2006, but engineers believe that 1000-passenger airliners are within reach.

In contrast with this expansion of commercial jets, the future of private planes will reflect the increasingly grid-locked roads. This will see the creation of small, personal "air vehicles" - as easy to use and as affordable as a car, quiet, with room for four passengers. The development of computer-operated systems would allow people to gain a licence to fly the vehicles in a short space of time.

Again, experts believe that within ten years, experimental short-takeoff-and-landing commercial aircraft will exist, requiring only a 32 metre runway, making them ideal for domestic use.

Ultimately, however, aviation technology will be driven by goverments’ need to send military hardware into space. With the United States recommitting to the Star Wars missile defence system, the technology used will trickle down into domestic use.