Aviation in the pioneer era

The pioneer era of aviation was the period of aviation history between the first successful powered flight, generally accepted to have been made by the Wright Brothers on 17 December 1903, and the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914.

Once the principles of powered controlled flight had been established there was a period in which many different aircraft configurations were experimented with. By 1914 the tractor configuration biplane had become the most popular form of aircraft design, and would remain so until the end of the 1920s. The development of the internal combustion engine—primarily from their use in early automobiles even before the start of the 20th century—which enabled successful heavier-than-air flight also produced rapid advances in lighter-than-air flight, particularly in Germany where the Zeppelin company rapidly became the world leader in the field of airship construction.

During this period aviation passed from being seen as the preserve of eccentric enthusiasts to being an established technology, with the establishment of specialist aeronautical engineering research organizations and university courses and the creation of major industrial aircraft manufacturing businesses, and aviation became a subject of enormous popular interest. Flying displays such as the Grande Semaine d'Aviation of 1909 and air races such as the Gordon Bennett Trophy and the Circuit of Europe attracted huge audiences and successful pilots such as Jules Védrines and Claude Grahame-White became celebrities.

An emerging technology

Although the Wright brothers made their first successful powered flights in December 1903 and by 1905 were making flights of significant duration, their achievement was largely unknown to the world in general and was widely disbelieved. After their flights in 1905 the Wrights stopped work on developing their aircraft and concentrated on trying to commercially exploit their invention, attempting to interest the military authorities of the United States and then, after being rebuffed, France and Great Britain. Consequently, attempts to achieve powered flight continued, principally in France. To publicize the aeronautical concourse at the upcoming World's Fair in St. Louis, Octave Chanute gave a number of lectures at aero-clubs in Europe, sharing his excitement about flying gliders. He showed slides of his own glider flying experiments as well as some of the Wrights glider flying in 1901 and 1902. All these talks were reproduced in club journals. The lecture to members of the Aéro-Club de France in April 1903 is the best known, and the August 1903 issue of ''l'Aérophile'' carried an article by Chanute that included drawings of his gliders as well as the Wright glider and a description of their approach to the problem, saying "the time is evidently approaching when, the problem of equilibrium and control having been solved, it will be safe to apply a motor and a propeller". Chanute's lecture moved Ernest Archdeacon one of the founder members of the Aéro-Club, to conclude his account of the lectures:

In October 1904 the Aéro-Club de France announced a series of prizes for achievements in powered flight, but little practical work was done: Ferdinand Ferber, an army officer who in 1898 had experimented with a hang-glider based on that of Otto Lilienthal continued his work without any notable success, Archdeacon commissioned the construction of a glider based on the Wright design but smaller and lacking the provision for roll control which made a number of brief flights at Berck-sur-Mer in April 1904, piloted by Ferber and Gabriel Voisin (the longest of around , compared to the achieved by the Wrights in 1902) : another glider based on the Wright design was constructed by Robert Esnault-Pelterie, who rejected wing-warping as unsafe and instead fitted a pair of mid-gap control surfaces in front of the wings, intended to be used in a differential manner in place of wing-warping and in conjunction to act as elevators (as what are known today as elevons): this is the first recorded use of ailerons, the concept for which had been patented over a generation earlier by M. P. W. Boulton of the United Kingdom in 1868. This was not successful and Esnault-Pelterie was later to use its failure to support the position that the Wright Brothers claims were unfounded. However his design was not an exact copy of the Wrights' glider, particularly in having a greatly increased wing camber. Ferber's copy was likewise unsuccessful: it was crudely constructed, without ribs to maintain the wing camber, but is notable for his later addition of a fixed rear-mounted stabilising tail surface, the first instance of this feature in a full-size aircraft. Archdeacon abandoned the 1904 glider after the first attempts and commissioned a second glider, which was constructed by Gabriel Voisin in 1905; this broke up in mid air when towed into the air behind a car, fortunately carrying sandbags in place of a pilot. Voisin then constructed another glider, mounted on floats and introducing the box kite-like stabilising tail which was to be a characteristic of his later aircraft: this was successfully towed into the air behind a motor-boat on 8 June 1905, and Voisin's glider and a second similar aircraft built for Louis Blériot were tested on 18 July, the flight of Blériots aircraft ending in a crash in which Voisin, the pilot, was nearly drowned. Voisin and Blériot then constructed a powered tandem wing biplane, which was subjected to a number of modifications without any success.

First powered flights outside of the United States

Full details of the Wright Brothers' flight control system was published in ''l'Aérophile'' in the January 1906 issue, making clear both the mechanism and its aerodynamic reason. Nevertheless, the crucial importance of lateral control in making controlled turns was not appreciated, and the French experimenters instead aimed to construct inherently stable aircraft.

In the late summer and autumn of 1906 Alberto Santos Dumont made the first successful powered heavier-than-air flights in Europe in his 14-''bis'', culminating in a flight of 220 m (722 ft) on the grounds of the Parisian Chateau de Bagatelle on 12 November, winning an Aéro-Club de France prize for a flight of over 100 m. Initially relying on pronounced dihedral to provide stability, by the November flight, octagonal-planform interplane ailerons - as a possible "first-use" (if not ''the'' first) of Boulton's 1868 patent on an ''engine-powered'' airframe - somewhat like Esnault-Pelterie's design for his own glider; had been fitted to Santos-Dumont's aircraft for its own concluding flights, before its own imminent retirement.

Earlier that year Gabriel Voisin had established an aircraft construction company at Boulogne-Billancourt: his first successful aircraft, which lacked any provision for roll control, was the Delagrange No.1 biplane, named after its owner Leon Delagrange. This was first flown by Voisin on 30 March 1907. and in February 1908 a second example flown by Henri Farman won the Archdeacon-de la Meurthe ''Grand Prix d'Aviation'' for the first officially observed closed-circuit flight of over a kilometer. Among the most persistent French experimenters was Louis Blériot, who after a brief partnership with Gabriel Voisin, had established '' Recherches Aéronautiques Louis Blériot'' and produced a series of monoplane designs. On 16 November 1907 he successfully flew his Blériot VII, a monoplane with tail surfaces moved differentially for roll control and in unison for pitch control. This aircraft, which is recognised as the first successful monoplane, was soon wrecked in a crash, but was quickly followed by his eighth design, the first aircraft ever to essentially have the original form of flight control setup used to this day.

In North America, the Canadian-American Aerial Experiment Association was founded by Alexander Graham Bell, who had made a number of earlier experiments with tetrahedral kites, and John McCurdy and his friend Frederick Walker Baldwin, two recent engineering graduates of the University of Toronto, on 30 September 1907. The AEA produced a number of fundamentally similar biplane designs, greatly influenced by the Wright's work, and these were flown with increasing success during 1908. Baldwin flew their first design, ''Red Wing'' on 12 March 1908, flying 97 m (319 ft) before crashing and being damaged beyond repair: its successor, ''White Wing'', equipped with ailerons, made three flights in May, the best of 310 m (1,017 ft), before being destroyed in a crash. On 4 July 1908 their next aircraft, the ''June Bug'' piloted by Glenn Curtiss, won the ''Scientific American'' trophy for the first officially observed one kilometer flight in North America. After the AEA's disbandment at the end of March 1909, one of its American members went on to start a growing US-based aviation firm.

In 1908 Wilbur Wright finally visited Europe and in August made a series of flight demonstrations which convincingly demonstrated the superiority of their aircraft, particularly its ability to make controlled banked turns, to the European aviation community. The first flight only lasted 1 minute 45 seconds, in which two circles were flown, but the effect was profound, Louis Blériot saying "I consider that for us in France, and everywhere, a new era in mechanical flight has commenced. I am not sufficiently calm after the event to thoroughly express my opinion. My view can be best conveyed in the words, 'It is marvellous!' " Leon Delagrange simply said "We are beaten". Following these demonstrations, Henri Farman fitted his Voisin biplane with ailerons in order to achieve the full controllability demonstrated by Wilbur Wright: following a falling-out with Gabriel Voisin he then started his own aircraft manufacturing business. His first design, the Farman III

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