---
title: "History of aviation"
chunk: 15/15
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_aviation"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:59:18.099578+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

== 21st century ==
21st-century aviation has seen increasing interest in fuel savings and fuel diversification, as well as low cost airlines and facilities. Additionally, much of the developing world that did not have good access to air transport has been steadily adding aircraft and facilities; though severe congestion remains a problem in many up and coming nations. Around 20,000 city pairs are served by commercial aviation, up from less than 10,000 as recently as 1996.
There appears to be newfound interest in returning to the supersonic era whereby waning demand in the turn of the 20th century made flights unprofitable, as well as the final commercial stoppage of the Concorde due to reduced demand following a fatal accident and rising costs.
At the beginning of the 21st century, digital technology allowed subsonic military aviation to begin eliminating the pilot in favour of remotely operated or completely autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). In April 2001, the unmanned aircraft Global Hawk flew from Edwards AFB in the US to Australia non-stop and un-refuelled. This is the longest point-to-point flight ever undertaken by an unmanned aircraft and took 23 hours and 23 minutes. In October 2003, the first totally autonomous flight across the Atlantic by a computer-controlled model aircraft occurred. UAVs are now an established feature of modern warfare, carrying out pinpoint attacks under the control of a remote operator.
Major disruptions to air travel in the 21st century included the closing of U.S. airspace due to the September 11 attacks, and the closing of most of European airspace after the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull.
In 2015, André Borschberg and Bertrand Piccard flew a record distance of 4,481 miles (7,211 km) from Nagoya, Japan to Honolulu, Hawaii in a solar-powered plane, Solar Impulse 2. The flight took nearly five days; during the nights the aircraft used its batteries and the potential energy gained during the day.
On 14 July 2019, Frenchman Franky Zapata attracted worldwide attention when he participated at the Bastille Day military parade riding his invention, a jet-powered Flyboard Air. He subsequently succeeded in crossing the English Channel on his device on 4 August 2019, covering the 35-kilometre (22 mi) journey from Sangatte in northern France to St Margaret's Bay in Kent, UK, in 22 minutes, with a midpoint fueling stop included.
24 July 2019 was the busiest day in aviation, Flightradar24 recorded a total of over 225,000 flights that day. It includes helicopters, private jets, gliders, sight-seeing flights, as well as personal aircraft.
On 10 June 2020, the Pipistrel Velis Electro became the first electric aeroplane to secure a type certificate from EASA.
In the early 21st Century, the first fifth-generation military fighters were produced, starting with the F-22 Raptor. As of 2019, Russia, America and China have 5th gen aircraft.
The COVID-19 pandemic had a significant impact on the aviation industry due to the resulting travel restrictions as well as slump in demand among travellers, and may also affect the future of air travel. For example, the mandatory use of face masks on planes was common when flying in 2020 and 2021.

=== Mars ===
On 19 April 2021, NASA successfully flew its diminutive unmanned helicopter Ingenuity on Mars, humanity's first controlled powered aircraft flight on another planet. The helicopter rose to a height of three metres and hovered in a stable holding position for 30 seconds. A video of the flight was made by its accompanying rover, Perseverance.
Ingenuity, which was initially designed for five demonstration flights, flew 72 times traveling 11 miles in nearly three years. As a homage to all of its aerial predecessors, it carries a postage stamp sized piece of wing fabric from the 1903 Wright Flyer.
Ingenuity's last flight was 18 January 2024, a span of 2 years, 333 days since its first takeoff (the duration in Martian days, or sols, was 1035). Broken and damaged rotor blades suffered during its final landing forced the helicopter's retirement.

== See also ==

Aviation archaeology
Claims to the first powered flight
List of firsts in aviation
Timeline of aviation

== References ==

=== Bibliography ===

== Further reading ==

Van Vleck, Jenifer (2013). Empire of the Air: Aviation and the American Ascendancy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

== External links ==

E. C. Vivian (October 1920). History of Aeronautics.
"The Gaston and Albert Tissandier Collection". Rare Book & Special Collections. Library of Congress. Publications relating to the history of aeronautics, (1,800 titles dispersed in the collection)
Carroll F. Gray. "Flying Machines".
Peter Whalley. "History of Flight - Key events". Knowledge Media Institute. Open University.
"Historical archive since 1919". Aerospace Industries Association.
"Alberto Santos-Dumont Est Peut-Être Le Véritable 'Père De L'aviation'". Magazine Aviation. (in French)

=== Articles ===
Carroll F. Gray (August 2002). "The five first flights". WW1 AERO - The Journal of the Early Aeroplane. Archived from the original on 22 April 2018. Retrieved 13 June 2003.
Jürgen Schmidhuber (2003). "First Powered Flight - Plane Truth". Nature. No. 421. p. 689.
Richard Harris (December 2003). "First Flyers—They're not who you think..." In Flight USA. Archived from the original on 13 July 2011. Retrieved 26 December 2007.
Richard P. Hallion (July 2008). "Airplanes that Transformed Aviation". Air & Space Magazine. Smithsonian.
"American Aviation Heritage" (PDF). National Park Service. March 2011. Archived from the original (PDF) on 7 February 2016.

=== Media ===
"Transportation Photographs - Airplanes". Digital Collections. University of Washington Libraries. in the Pacific Northwest region and Western United States during the first half of the 20th century.
"Strut design airplanes". University of Houston Digital Library. 1911.
Michael Maloney (2009). A Dream of Flight (Documentary on the first powered flight by a Briton in Britain, JTC Moore Brabazon, in 1909). Countrywide Productions.