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Put your feet up in the air

After watching a flight show in Dubai (United Arab Emirates) earlier this year, I read a bit about the aviation’s history: Flying like a bird was probably always a desire of human kind. 1700 BC the dangers of it were explored in the Greek myth of Icarus and Daedalus. Still way before Christ was born, kites were dancing in the Chinese skies. More than 150o years later Marco Polo reported manned kites, Leonardo da Vinci drafts his famous flying machines around 1500. Few hundred years later the era of balloons started.

But it was only during the very end of the 19th century that “plane-like things” lifted people into the air. In 1891 Otto Lilienthal flies about 25 meters, two years later already 250 meters. In 1894 his construction is the first to go into serial production. In 1896 he dies − not surprisingly as a consequence of a plane crash. Charles Lindbergh was still not born by that time, but he was the guy who became world famous after flying non-stop from New York’s Long Island to Paris in 1927. This success accelerated the already booming commercial aviation.

In the UAE, the British Government established the first airport in Sharjah in 1932, serving flights routed to India and Australia. Dubai’s airport, which is by now one of the biggest in the world, only opened five years later in 1937. Today, Dubai is not only home of the (by far) biggest fleet of A380s, but also witnesses new aviation world premiers during regular flight shows every year.

http://www.emiratesaviation.org/AAAA%20DUBAI%202011/ZOLTAN%20VERS%201.pdf

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 16th, 2011 at 1:06 PM. It is filed under Moments and tagged with United Arab Emirates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.