10 Milestone Flights

摘要

Fearing the attention of possible competitors, the Wrights tried to keep their achievement of powered flight secret for five years while they developed their Flyers further, Meanwhile, in France, Brazilian inventor Alberto Santos-Dumont was feeling no such inhibitions. Santos-Dumont designed 14-bis, a pine-frame biplane with a 24-horsepower Antoinette motorboat engine, and he made several flights in it before crowds outside Paris. technically, his first flight was on September 13, 1906, but it went only about 23 feet and reached an altitude―if that is the word―of two feet. The flight he made on October 23, which covered 197 feet at an altitude of about 10 feet, was his first substantial flight. It was also the first powered flight made anywhere outside of the United States, as well as the first powered flight by a non-Wright airplane.