Early Flight 3

Renaissance Europe and the Ottoman Empire

Leonardo da Vinci's Ornithopter wings
Some five centuries after Ibn Firnas, Leonardo da Vinci came up with a hang glider design in which the inner parts of the wings are fixed, and some control surfaces are provided towards the tips (as in the gliding flight in birds). While his drawings exist and are deemed flightworthy in principle, he himself never flew in it. Based on his drawings, and using materials that would have been available to him, a prototype constructed in the late 20th century was shown to fly.

However, his sketchy design was interpreted with modern knowledge of aerodynamic principles, and whether his actual ideas would have flown is not known. A model he built for a test flight in 1496 did not fly, and some other designs, such as the four-person screw-type helicopter have severe flaws.

In the 17th century, the Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi reported that in 1630-1632, he saw the Ottoman Turkish polymath Hezarfen Ahmet Celebi using a winged aircraft to fly across the Bosporus. He jumped off the Galata Tower (55m high) in Istanbul, and allegedly flew a distance of about 3km, and landed on the other (Asian) side, uninjured. A glide of 3 km from a launching height of 3km would at best require a modern glider to have considerable skill and practice, though it is known Celebi had practiced considerably prior to his flight.

In 1633, Hezarfen's brother, Lagari Hasan Çelebi, launched himself in the air in a seven-winged rocket, which was composed of a large cage with a conical top filled with gunpowder. This was the first known example of a manned rocket and an artifically-powered aircraft. The flight was accomplished as a part of celebrations performed for the birth of Ottoman Emperor Murad IV's daughter. Evliya reported that Lagari had made a soft landing in the Bosporus by using the wings attached to his body as a parachute after the gunpowder was consumed, foreshadowing the sea-landing methods of astronauts with parachutes after their voyages from outer space.

The flight was estimated to have lasted about twenty seconds and the maximum height reached around 300 metres. Lagari was rewarded by the sultan with a valuable military position in the Ottoman army.

In 1670 Francesco Lana de Terzi published work that suggested lighter than air flight would be possible by having copper foil spheres that contained a vacuum that would be lighter than the displaced air, lift an airship (rather literal from his drawing). While not being completely off the mark, he did fail to realize that the pressure of the surrounding air would smash the spheres.