Since the beginning of time, man has wanted to fly. Not just to get a bird’s-eye view of the land, but to soar above the ordinary, to experience complete freedom.
Montgolfier brothers are the recognized inventors of the first aircraft. Nevertheless, numerous attempts were made before them, some of them in Ruthenia. Praying of Daniel the Immured, a 13th century Old Russian literary monument, features the following description: “...and another one flies from the church or high chambers on his silk wings”.
The most famous and beautiful legend is a story of Russian Icarus, a serf called Nikita Kryakutny, who allegedly flew with home-made wings from a chapel in Alexandrovskaya Sloboda, the tsar’s residence, which caused the tsar Ivan the Terrible to issue an edict punishing Nikita: “A man is no bird and has no wings. Anyone who attaches wooden wings is acting against nature, and the inventor is to be punished for this alliance with evil forces by decapitation, and the body of the accursed man, the stinking dog, is to be thrown to be eaten by pigs, and his invention is to be burnt after the sacred liturgy.
As time passed, medieval dreams came true. World aviation history began, with numerous Russian names in it. Pyotr Nesterov was the first to fly a loop and to perform air ramming in an air battle. Konstantin Artseulov was the first to go into a spin in his aeroplane and then recover successfully. Alexander Mozhaysky built a steam-engine aeroplane.
During the tests, Mozhaysky’s “air-flying apparatus”, equipped with all main elements of a modern aeroplane, namely an engine unit, a fuselage, a fixed wing, an empennage and an underframe, performed a run-out on an inclined platform and took off the ground, but after the take-off it lurched to the side and fell, breaking its wing. The imperfection of the engine prevented the aircraft from performing a continued controlled flight, but historians are still arguing if Mozhaysky’s aircraft was the first heavier-than-air aircraft (except for gliders) that became airborne with a man on board, and did so 20 years before the Wright brothers’ aeroplane.