A Report

| 1898-1908 | 1909-1918 | 1919-1928 | 1929-1938 | 1939-1948 |
| 1949-1958 | 1959-1968 | 1969-1978 | 1979-1988 | 1989-1998 |

Shortly after the Year 1000 Elimer, a Benedictine monk from Malmesbury abbey in Wiltshire, climbed to the top of the abbey's west tower, donned a pair of canvas wings stretched over a wooden frame, said some prayers and jumped off. Buffeted by gusts of winds, Eilmer glided in a disorderly fashion some 656 feet before crashing into a neighboring field. When rescuers came, he wondered whether his semi-failure was due to the absence of a tail. Born in 1773, Englishman George Cayley was fascinated with birds and the fact that they could fly. At 23 he experimented with a small, unmanned helicopter. Three years later he built a model flying machine with a fuselage for the payload, wings for lift and a tail for stability.

Cayley's only mistake was equipping his flying machine with aerodynamic oars instead of a propeller for thrust. Later Cayley discovered that curved wings would create a depression above them, pulling them higher. He understood that when the wing's angle changed in relation to the wind, the center of the thrust shifted. He also realized that streamlining was the key to mastering drag, the longitudinal retarding force exerted by air.

On November 21, 1783, the court of Louis XVI and a Paris crowd that included Benjamin Franklin gathered to see an unprecedented sight. Earlier, in the summer of that same year, the Montgolfier brothers had sent up a prototype balloon carrying a rooster, a duck and a goat. The flight lasted eight minutes before the balloon landed in Vaucresson forest. Now everyone was waiting for the first manned flight.

Pilatre de Rozier and his co-pilot, the marquis d'Arlandes, took off in the Montgolfiers' balloon, rose to an altitude of 3,200 feet and in half an hour flew from one end of Paris to the other, landing where the place d'ltalie is today.

Ten days later, one of the Montgolfier brothers' competitors, Jacquest Charles, took off at Nesles to make the first solo balloon flight in history. The balloon rose toward the setting sun to an altitude of 9,600 feet and didn't land until the light was gone.

A few farsighted, wealthy men believe that the future of humanity will be written the sky. Their names are Hanry de La Vaulx, Henri de La Valette, Albert de Dion, Leon Serpollet and Ernest Archdeacon. On October 20, 1898 they create the Aero Club de France. The same year, Emile Zola writes J'Accuse in defense of Dreyfus; Pierre and Maries Curie discover polonium and radium; and Valdemar Poulsen builds a sound recording machine. On December 17, 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright get the Flyer 1 off the ground. Three years leter, Alberto Santos-Dumont flies to Bagatelle and, on January 13, 1908, Henry Farman sets a new record with a one kilometer flight.

The Aero-Club De France was created on 20 October 1898 by a handful of wealthy gentlemen, including the Comte de la Vaulx, Henry Deutsch de la Meurthe and Albert de Dion, all avid balloonists. Soon after, a handsome, young and extremely rich Brazillian, Alberto Santos-Dumont, joined them. At the time, few people a believed that it would ever be possible to fly heavier-than-air machines, but the eccentric and courageous Santos-Dumont was one of them. The debate over who was the first person to really fly continues to this day, but there were a number of "firsts" over a period of ten years : the Americans Orville and Wilbur Wright on their Flyer (17 December 1903); the Romanian Trajan Vuia, who flew nearly 80 feet in 1906; the Frenchmen Louis Bleriot and Henry Farman; and Santos-Dumont, whose No 14bis achieved the first certified recond, with a 721-foot-long flight on 12 November 1906.

Santos-Dumont later constructed his Demoiselles No 19 and No 20, the first mass-produced airplanes. Santos-Dumont was obviously one of the select few in the rarefied world of aviators, and on 7 January 1909, he received pilot's license no 12 from the Aero-Club de France (the Wright brothers received nos 14 and 15-no 13 was never alloted). He pushed aviation technology ever further, but he remained a utopian: when the League of Nations was formed after World War I, he petitioned the organization to prohibit the use of "the aircraft as a combat weapon or bomber", and even offered a 10,000-france prize for "the best work written on the subject".

To no avail. On 23 July 1932, Santos-Dumont, depressed and suffering from multiple sclerosis, committed suicide in Brazil. In 1996, on the 90th anniversary of the historic flight of the No 14bis, the Aero-Club de France paid homage to the aviator, inventor, innovator and humanist. The history of aviation would have been different without the Aero-Club de France, but it also owes a great deal to the extravagant Brazilian. Obrigado, Monsieur Santos-Dumont.

On 17 December 1903, on a North Carolina beach at Kitty Hawk, Orville and Wilbur Wright lifted off for the first powered, controlled and sustained flight in history, which lasted 12 full seconds. Wilbur (the elder brother) and Orville were born into a family of seven children. The two first worked in a small printer's shop, then in a bicycle factory in Dayton, Ohio. Reading about Otto Lilienthal's exploits and Octave Chanute's work sealed their destiny as an aviation team: They built a biplane kite in 1899 to test their theories. They experimented with gliders, mastering balance, control and scale, then went on to design an engine for a controllable aircraft.

The Wright Brothers in particular owe a great deal to this French-born American civil engineer, whose bridge designs advanced the development of the US railway system. Chanute compiled data and information on the history of flight, then published Progress in Flying Machines (1894), a collection of aeronautical experiments considired the aviation bible of the time. The man-carrying gliders Chanute designed would inspire Ferdinand Ferber and Gabriel and Charles Voisin. Chanute may never have flown himself, but he played a key role in bringing about heavier-than-air flight.

Henri Farman made aviation history by flying the first European circular one-kilometer flight at Issy-les-Moulineaux aboard a Voisin biplane on 13 January 1908. He was awarded the deutsch-Archdeacon prize. In October of that year, Farman set a new record for distance with the first city-to-city air link between Bouy and Reims - 17 miles in all. He improved his plane by modifying the tail and adding ailerons. Henri and his brother Maurice subsequently built military planes, and after World War I, they introduced the Farman Goliath airliner, built to seat 12. It inaugurated the Paris-London route on 8 February 1919, with Lucien Bossoutrot in the pilots seat.

The club issues its first pilot's licenses in the presence of the pioneers of the heroic early days, including the Wright brothers, Santos-Dumont, Henry Farman, Captain Ferber, Robert Esnault-Pelterie and Louis Bleriot, who receives license number 1 and on 25 July 1909 becomes the first person to fly the English Channel. Countless first take place during this decade. Henri Fabre flies the first seaplane, the Peruvian Geo Chavez crosses the Alps, the French pilot Henri Pequet carries the first air mail to India, Adolphe Pegoud makes the first loop-the-loop, Roland Garros becomes the first pilot to cross the Mediterranean and on 14 January 1914 the first paying passenger travels from Saint Petersburg to Tampa, Florida. When World War I breaks out, aircraft reveal their military vocation.

IN AUGUST 1913, Adolphe Pegoud, flying a Bleriot XI, jumped out of the plane above a crowd of astonished onlookers. The plane crashed but its pilot parachuted to safety, landing in a field near Versailles. As he floated downward, Pegoud watched his plane turn somersaults before crashing. Before he even reached the ground to the roar of the cheering crowd, the daredevil knew his next stunt would make him famous.

On September 21, Pegoud took off in a Bleriot XI-2 near Versailles. His name was spelled out in large black letters across the wingspan to let the crowd below know exactly who the pilot was. When the plane reached a certain altitude, he pushed the throttle in as far it would go and went into a slight dive.

In the middle of the crowd, a man cranked away at a move camera. Up in the sky, Pegoud was hunched over the speeding plane's controls to counter the swerve. An icy wind buffeeted the unstreamlined fuselage. It was now or never. He nosed the aircraft up, gently at first so the frail, trembling wooden frame would not break apart. The vibrations faded as the plane slowed down. The nose went into an even steeper climb. Pegoud pulled the throttle out full-stop, further slowing the plane. The motor began sputtering, and the propeller spun needlessly. The nose was pointing straight up. The plane halted in mid-air.

The nose slowly passed the vertical point. The frame trembled and shook. Pegoud felt as if he were suspended in mid-air. The Bleriot was completely upside-down, its pilot strapped in by a leather seat belt.

The moment seemed to last forever. Then the plane's nose described a backward arch in the sky, its pilot still clutching the controls. He let the plane fly until the ground appeared straight ahead, like a wall. The aircraft sped up as it dove, the wind started roaring again and Pegoud brought the nose level with the ground, pulling hard at the controls, then easing up to keep the shaking, creaking frame from breaking apart.

He had made the first loop-the-loop in aviation history.

The day was a gloomy one, and Louis Bleriot had burned his ankle during a previous flight and was limping. But his archrival Hubert Latham was gearing up to take revenge for an earlier failure on July 21, and it would take more than a string of setbacks to take the wind out of Bleriot's sails. What's more, he still had his friends, his wife and his pride, and the sun was breaking through. At 4:35 am, Bleriot took off in the direction of the English Channel. Forty-five minutes later, he landed near Dover. As HG Wells remarked, "England was no longer an island." And Bleriot had made history.

On March 8, 1910, the distinguished members of the Aero-Club de France granted pilot's license no 36 to Elise Deroche - the first awarded to a woman. Deroche, alias the Baroness Raymonde de la Roche, was a plumber's daughter, an actress and a sculptress, as well as an excellent aviatrix who had discovered the thrill of piloting only six months bofore, in a Voisin twin-seater. She set the altitude record for women pilots by climbing to 15,300 feet in June 1919. Shortly afterward, she disappeared over the Somme when the plane she was riding in as a passenger went down.

Roland Garros might have become a concert pianist if it hadn't been for the Reims Meet of 1909, a flying event that changed his life. He was 21 years old, and he decided to become an aviator. American John Moisant recruited Garros as an exhibition pilot. On Sept 23, 1913, he flew from France to Tunisia across the Mediterranean Sea in 7 hours and 53 minutes - a 453-mile flight. He became a combat pilot during World War I, and was known for having attached metal plates to his propeller blades, behind which he rigged a machine gun. Garros was shot down one month before the armistice.

| 1898-1908 | 1909-1918 | 1919-1928 | 1929-1938 | 1939-1948 |
| 1949-1958 | 1959-1968 | 1969-1978 | 1979-1988 | 1989-1998 |