100 Years of Flying

Happy New Year to you all -wherever in the World you are - and to celebrate making it into 2015. I have some travel trivia for my loyal readers. This week will be a 100 years since the World’s first commercial flight. Bi-planes where the model of flight a century ago and they did the job well. However, as demand and aviation engineering grew so did plane sizes. Let’s take a look how the success of flying has soared throughout the last century and with some bumps along the road too (pardon the plane puns).

1919 – First Transatlantic Flight. By A lock and Brown who departed from St Johns, Newfoundland and landed in Ireland. They made commercial flights across the Atlantic Ocean possible and given many tourists the opportunity to go to America for their holiday.

Double-winged plane, model of the first commercial flight (Source: Google Images)

1935 – The Flight that changed the World. The Douglas DC-3 plane manufactured by the Douglas Aircraft Company was the first fixed-wing propeller driven aircraft. Models were used throughout World-War 2 and was acquired by American Airlines with flights between Newark and Chicago.

1947 – The Kangaroo Route. The name given to the first Qantas flight from the UK and Australia over the Eastern Hemisphere. By 2003, 20 of the World’s airlines used the route.

Qantas airplane (Source: Google Images)

1969– The First Flight of Concorde.  The now defunct supersonic passenger airliner ran commercial flights for 27 years. At the time the slime line, pointy nosed jet was a marvel of the aviation world.  Its redeeming feature was its speed, which could fly twice as fast as a regular plane.

British Airways Concorde (en.wikipedia.org) 

1970 – The Jumbo Jet.In January 1970, Pan American World Airways introduced the first Boeing 747 nicknamed the “Jumbo Jet” a wide body plane usually with two decks and four engines. These are usually used for long haul flights to Australia and America etc….

1977 - First Plane Collision.  Known as the Tenerife Disaster, a KLM plane collided with a PAN AM flight as they left Los Rodeos Airport.

1988 – Dream Plane. The– 255 Mriya is the World’s largest plane with a take-off weight of 640 tonnes. Mriya, means Dream and it was s a dream come true for the aviation industry.

2014 – World’s Longest Flight. Qantas Airlines launched its ambitious 15 hour non-stop flight between Sydney and Dallas. The route covers a total of 13,804 km and can be travelled in style with a First-Class service.