How Humanity Learned to Fly
The Long Journey from Myth to RealitySince prehistoric times, people have watched birds and dreamed of growing wings. Before technology made flight possible, the ability to soar through the skies belonged only to gods and superheroes. But human curiosity—and a willingness to take risks—drove people to try to lift themselves from the ground again and again.
From the myth of Icarus to the twelve seconds the Wright brothers spent in the air above a North Carolina beach on the cold morning of 17 December 1903, humanity progressed to scheduled flights, jet engines, and global airlines.
A new stage in the development of Kazakhstan’s civil aviation began at the turn of the millennium. On 15 May 2002, Air Astana operated its first scheduled flight on the Almaty–Astana route. This flight not only connected the country’s two main cities, but also marked the emergence of a new national carrier. To commemorate this event, Qalam, together with Air Astana, tells the story of how humanity learned to fly.
Flight as Myth
Humanity has, since time immemorial, dreamed of escaping the pull of Earth and its gravity. But flight, for much of history, has belonged either to birds or to supernatural beings—and those who dared to defy the established order risked death. Indeed, this is the fundamental idea that gave rise to the myth of the ancient Greek engineer Daedalus and his son Icarus. Daedalus built the famous Knossos labyrinth—a vast, confusing maze on the island of Crete that was inhabited by the mythical Minotaur, a fearsome creature that was half man and half bull—for King Minos. Legend had it that no one who entered the labyrinth could escape it, and yet, the Greek hero Theseus, with the help of Minos's daughter Ariadne, managed to do just that. As punishment, Daedalus and his son were imprisoned on Crete by the furious ruler. However, they managed to escape thanks to a flying contraption that Daedalus constructed from feathers and wax.
Their escape, however, was only partly successful: Icarus flew too close to the sun, which caused the wax on his wings to melt, and he plunged headlong into the sea. And although Daedalus himself did eventually reach his destination, winged humans, for centuries to come, would remain the sole province of divine beings—angels, sirens, and other mythical creatures.
Are there other myths about flying people?
The Persian epic Shahnameh offers its own cautionary tale of ambition and flight. In it, King Kay Kavus decided to ascend to the heavens on a flying throne. On his orders, a golden throne was built, and eagles were then tied to its four corners with pieces of meat fastened above them. The hungry birds strained toward the bait and lifted the throne ever higher. But what began as a marvel quickly turned to disaster: the eagles grew tired, and Kay Kavus, along with his airborne ‘vehicle’, came crashing to the ground.
Flying Kites
One of the earliest documented attempts to carry the idea of flight from the realm of myth into the real world unfolded in China. It was there, in the fifth century BCE, that the first kites took shape, credited to a scholar named Lu Ban (c. 507–440 BC). These early kites were not toys. Designed primarily to read the wind's strength and direction, measure distances, and serve a range of military purposes, the kite, in many ways, was a tool of science and strategy. Yet, Lu Ban himself never left the ground on one. At this time, the kite remained an instrument, a way to read the sky, but not yet a way to reach it.
Later Chinese sources, however, report that kites were also used for human flight. Unlike the story of Icarus, these flights were far from voluntary. Wenxuan, the founding emperor of the Northern Qi dynasty, forced prisoners to leap from a tower while strapped to large paper kites. One such prisoner, Yuan Huangtou—the son of the former emperor of the Northern Wei dynasty—survived after flying an astonishing 2.5 kilometers. The kite, thus, became one of the earliest man-made devices capable of sustained flight. Centuries later, the Wright brothers would also study kites to understand how lift works.
The First Experiments
The next stage in humanity’s conquest of the skies began with the emergence of enthusiasts driven by an insatiable curiosity and a passion for discovery. The first such experimenter is widely considered to be Abbas ibn Firnas, a Muslim scholar from Córdoba, in what is now Spain. One of the great intellectuals of the ninth century, he embodied the spirit of his age by studying virtually every field of knowledge at once. The Andalusian polymath most likely knew the myth of Daedalus and Icarus and may have drawn inspiration from it as well. At the very least, traces of the mythical figure’s invention can be seen in ibn Firnas’s flying apparatus:
He clothed himself in feathers attached to silk, fashioned two wings for himself … rose into the air, flew and circled above, but upon landing severely injured his tailbone, for he had failed to realize that birds land on their tails.
A tenth-century source does not specify exactly how ibn Firnas took to the air, but he most likely created something resembling a glider and launched himself from a height or a tower. Ibn Firnas’s name was later immortalized in aviation history, and a monument erected in his honor now stands at Baghdad International Airport.
Interesting Fact
Similar glider experiments were taking place in other parts of the world around the same time. In the eleventh century, the English Benedictine monk Eilmer of Malmesbury (c. 980–c. 1070), who was also inspired by Greek myths, crafted a pair of wings for himself and leaped from the tower of Malmesbury Abbey, gliding nearly 200 meters. Astonishingly, he survived, even if his landing was far from graceful. Another semi-legendary, though remarkably long, flight was attributed to the Ottoman inventor Hezârfen Ahmed Çelebi (1609–1640), who lived in the early seventeenth century. According to a traveler's account, in 1632, the Ottoman inventor jumped from Galata Tower in Istanbul and flew across the Bosporus using homemade wings. If that single surviving account is to be believed, his journey covered an astonishing 3.5 kilometers—making it the longest flight of its kind up to that time. Even more remarkably, unlike all previous attempts, this one even ended without physical injury.
From Myth to Blueprint
Until the fifteenth century, human flight remained either an anecdote preserved in fragmentary chronicles or a myth. The first person to attempt a scientific explanation of flight—and most importantly, to record those ideas on paper—was one of history’s greatest dreamers and scholars: Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519). In his scientific treatise on the flight of birds, he wrote:
A bird is a machine operating according to mathematical laws, a machine that man is capable of reproducing in all its movements.
Leonardo da Vinci’s understanding of aerodynamics was far ahead of its time. He wrote that a body exerts the same resistance upon the air as the air exerts upon the body. Nearly two centuries later, Isaac Newton (1643–1727) would formulate a similar idea in his Third Law of Motion: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
But even a genius like Leonardo got some things wrong. He suggested that lift, the force that keeps an aircraft in the air, was generated by the formation of a dense airflow and high pressure beneath the wing. However, science today tells a different story—that lift arises primarily from reduced pressure, a kind of ‘suction’, above the upper surface of the wing. Some of Leonardo da Vinci’s other conclusions about aerodynamics were likewise later revised or disproven.
It is important to remember, however, that in his time, not only did aerodynamics as a scientific discipline not yet exist, but modern rational physics itself had not been established as a line of study. In addition, Leonardo da Vinci was self-taught: he never received a university education, had only a limited knowledge of Latin, no command of Greek, and certainly no access to the Chinese or Persian intellectual traditions on flight. His ideas did not arise from studying ancient treatises, but from careful observation and hands-on experimentation. In any case, although his research did not directly influence the later history of aviation, Leonardo was the first to transform the dream of flight from the realm of myth into an engineering problem. He created designs for several flying machines including an ornithopter with flapping wings; a prototype helicopter, in which a spiral structure was meant to ‘screw’ itself into the air; and a pyramid-shaped parachute intended to slow a person’s descent. Although the scientist dreamed throughout his life of achieving flight himself, all of these designs remained on paper and were unknown to humanity until the nineteenth century.
Could Leonardo Actually Have Flown?
Five hundred years after Leonardo da Vinci put pen to paper, his flying machines were finally tested in the real world. In the year 2000, the British parachutist Adrian Nicholas tested a parachute constructed from Leonardo’s drawings. The wooden pyramidal structure weighed about 85 kilograms, but despite its bulk, it genuinely slowed descent, proving that the master's fundamental idea worked. In 2020, students from the aerospace faculty of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands set out to test whether Leonardo’s ‘aerial screw’ could be transformed into a modern vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. Their project, Crimson Spin, was ultimately realized as a small drone, offering more proof of how far ahead of his times Leonardo was.
A Scientific Breakthrough
From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, modern science began to take the shape we know now. The era of universal scholars like Leonardo da Vinci gave way to specialized experts such as physicists, chemists, and mathematicians. During this period, an entirely new understanding of the world emerged. Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) advanced the heliocentric model of the universe, while Isaac Newton formulated the three laws of motion, without which modern physics would be unimaginable. In the 1760s, the Scottish inventor James Watt (1736–1819) developed a practical steam engine that helped launch the Industrial Revolution.
Then, in 1783, the brothers Joseph-Michel Montgolfier (1740–1810) and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier (1745–1799) demonstrated the world’s first flying hot air balloon in front of King Louis XVI, Queen Marie Antoinette, and an enormous crowd. Its passengers, however, were not humans but a duck, a rooster, and a sheep. After an eight-minute flight, all three landed safely. A few months later, Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier (1754–1785) and François Laurent d'Arlandes (1742–1809) flew over Paris in a similar balloon, becoming the world’s first true ‘pilots’. The appearance of the hot air balloon marked a major psychological and symbolic breakthrough in the history of aviation—for the first time, humanity had overcome the force of gravity.
Interesting Fact
One of the pivotal breakthroughs in the history of aerodynamics was the discovery of the square law of velocity. Until the late seventeenth century, many scientists assumed that air resistance increased in simple proportion to speed, meaning that if a body moved twice as fast, the resistance it encountered would merely double. However, experiments conducted by the French scientist Edme Mariotte (1620–1684) and Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) revealed something far more consequential: aerodynamic force grows as the square of velocity. In other words, doubling the speed does not double the resistance—it quadruples it. Mariotte was the first to publish this finding in 1673. Huygens, it appears, had arrived at the same conclusion even earlier, though he did not commit his results to print until 1690. Centuries later, these discoveries would form the foundation of basic aeronautical calculations.
The Father of the Modern Airplane
George Cayley (1773–1857), a nineteenth-century English baronet, fully deserves to be remembered as the ‘father of aeronautics’. His insatiable curiosity led him to conduct the first true scientific experiments to uncover the fundamental principles of flight. Through careful observation, he discovered that one of the secrets of bird flight lay in the curved shape of the wing and concluded that a machine with similarly shaped fixed wings might also be capable of flying.
And so, in 1804, Cayley designed, built, and launched the world’s first model glider. He continued his experiments throughout his life and, according to legend, in 1853, he sent his coachman on a short gliding flight across a shallow valley near his home at Brompton Hall. The terrified servant reportedly resigned immediately afterward, explaining that he had been hired to drive, not to fly. But Cayley’s contribution was not this single flight. It was his realization of what flight really required—that a heavier-than-air flying machine required separate systems for lift, propulsion, and control. He explained the importance of streamlined design, described how stability and maneuverability could be achieved, and emphasized the need for an engine to provide thrust. By becoming the first person to link scientific research and engineering directly to aviation, he opened the door to the future.
Interesting Fact
The idea that controlled flight required thrust generated by a power source inspired numerous experiments with steam engines. The first person to achieve relative success in this direction was the French inventor Clément Ader (1841–1925). Ader began work on his first powered aircraft in 1882. The machine was named Éole after Aeolus, the Greek god of the winds, and it was finally ready for testing in 1890. Éole was a tailless monoplane with curved wings resembling those of a bat. The most impressive feature of the aircraft was its 20-horsepower steam engine, which weighed only 51 kilograms and drove a four-bladed propeller. In the end, Ader managed to fly the monoplane for about 50 meters. However, the aircraft rose only around 25 centimeters above the ground and controlling it proved completely impractical because the pilot had to operate two foot pedals, six handles, and multiple engine-control levers simultaneously. In essence, the ‘airplane’ was virtually uncontrollable.
The First Professional Pilot
Another crucial step in the history of flight was the achievement of control in flying machines, and the breakthrough here was made by the German engineer Otto Lilienthal (1848–1896). In 1890, he published the results of his ground-based research in a book titled Birdflight as the Basis of Aviation. After this, he began to apply his findings to the design of the gliders he used in his continuing experiments. Over the next six years, beginning in 1890, Lilienthal carried out as many as 2,000 flights using eighteen different aircraft designs. For this reason, he can confidently be considered the world’s first professional pilot.
All of his machines were hang gliders, controlled during the flight by the shifting weight of the pilot, who hung suspended beneath the craft. Otto Lilienthal died on 9 August 1896 during yet another flight in a glider of his own design, when a sudden gust of wind caused him to fall from a height of approximately 15 meters. Lilienthal’s work lived on much after him. It became the starting point for the experimenters who would soon take the final decisive steps toward inventing the airplane.
The Dream Becomes Reality
It was on 17 December 1903 that humanity’s dream of flight finally became reality. The first controlled powered flight in history took place in the United States and was achieved by bicycle-shop owners, the brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright.
Their fascination with flight began in childhood, when their father gave them a toy helicopter made of paper and bamboo. The brothers played with it until it fell apart, then built one of their own—and many, many others followed. Between them, they even talked about making a craft big enough to carry them both.
The Wright brothers’ talent for engineering and design came from their mother, a woman with a strong mathematical education and the daughter of a carriage maker, which was essentially the equivalent of an auto mechanic at that time. Drawing on years of hands-on experience in their workshop, the Wright brothers achieved the defining breakthrough of the age: a three-axis control system that made it possible not just to get an aircraft off the ground but to actually steer it and keep it stable in the air.
The Wright brothers began their aviation experiments in 1899. They understood that the first and most important challenge was to find a way to control a flying machine in the air. And so, between 1900 and 1902, the two men built three gliders and tested them in Kitty Hawk, a town in North Carolina. The first gliders disappointed them, so in the autumn of 1901, they conducted a series of experiments in a wind tunnel built directly inside their bicycle workshop.
Based on those tests and their experience flying gliders, they designed and constructed a third full-scale glider in 1902. With it, the brothers completed around 1,000 flights: the aircraft remained airborne for up to twenty-six seconds and covered distances of nearly 189 meters. They were now ready to attempt powered, piloted flight.
Thus, with the help of Charles Taylor, their mechanic, the brothers designed and built an airplane as well as a four-cylinder internal combustion engine. They even manufactured the propellers themselves. And this brought them to the morning of 17 December 1903, when Orville Wright made the first flight in human history. It was an uncertain twelve seconds in the air, barely long enough to know if it truly counted.
A few minutes later, Wilbur Wright took his turn and flew 53 meters. Then, Orville took off again and covered 60 meters. During the final flight of the day, which was piloted by Wilbur, the Wright Flyer, the name the brothers had given to their first airplane, remained airborne for fifty-nine seconds and traveled 260 meters.
Those four flights changed the world.
In 1904, the brothers built the Wright Flyer II, the first airplane capable of completing a full circle in the air. Then came the Wright Flyer III, which, by 1905, could stay airborne for more than half an hour, make turns, bank, and even perform figure-eight turns in the air.
The Wright brothers deliberately avoided flying in public until they had secured patent protection and lined up contracts to sell their machine. In the autumn of 1905, they stopped flying altogether and turned their full attention to finding buyers for their technology. In 1906, they were granted a patent on their aircraft control system.
True recognition, however, arrived only in 1908. Wilbur began giving public demonstrations in Europe, astonishing audiences with his skill and the maneuverability of the Wright Model A biplane. By 1909, the brothers had sold the world’s first military aircraft.
In that same year, the Wright Company was producing four airplanes a month and had become the largest aircraft manufacturer in the world. The brothers also created one of the first aviation demonstration teams: pilots who toured from city to city performing aerial feats to promote and sell Wright airplanes.
Orville Wright continued flying until 13 May 1918, and his brother Wilbur Wright had passed away six years previously. In 1915, Orville sold his share of the business but remained actively involved in aviation affairs. When he died in 1948, he had lived long enough to witness many of aviation’s greatest achievements, all of which were a direct consequence of the work he and his brother had begun.
Interesting Fact
As is so often the case in the history of invention, questions of priority and precedence did not pass the Wright brothers by. Before them, the American Samuel Langley had built his own powered aircraft, called the Aerodrome, which he attempted to launch twice in 1903, only to watch it fall into a river both times. Langley's supporters at the Smithsonian Institution later argued that his machine had nonetheless been capable of flight, and the dispute with the Wrights stretched on for decades. There was another contender as well: the Brazilian Alberto Santos-Dumont, who worked in France. In 1906, his aircraft took to the air over Paris, and the flight was officially witnessed and documented. Yet aviation historians have consistently favored the Wright brothers and do not question the validity of their 1903 flights.
Modern Flight
After the Wright brothers, aviation developed at an extraordinary speed. Unfortunately, the driving forces behind this progress were the two World Wars, which forced nations to build full-scale air fleets. Between the wars, however, the first regular passenger flights appeared in 1919. Then, in the 1950s, with the arrival of jet aircraft, commercial air travel became far more widespread and accessible.
The Wright brothers marked another defining milestone in aviation history: after them, the roles of aircraft designer and pilot became clearly distinct professions. In 1909, they began training pilots in France, and in 1910, they established a flight school in the United States. Between 1910 and 1916, the schools of the Wright Company trained more than 100 aviators, including the first United States military pilots.
Fortunately, aviation did not remain a male-only domain for long. Amelia Earhart (1897–1939) became the first female pilot to cross the Atlantic Ocean in 1928. However, it is also worth remembering the very first woman pilot in history: Raymonde de Laroche (1882–1919), who received her license from the French Aero Club.
Aviation in Kazakhstan
The development of aviation in Kazakhstan began with the formation of the USSR. In 1923, shortly after the end of the Russian Civil War, the Council of Labor and Defense issued a decree titled ‘On Assigning Technical Supervision of Air Routes to the Main Administration of the Air Fleet and on the Establishment of a Civil Aviation Council’. Thus, that year is regarded as the point at which Soviet civil aviation was born. The first regular flights connected Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod, which were 400 kilometers apart, and air services soon expanded across the entire country.
In the same year, 1923, on the initiative of the Kazakh writer and statesman Saken Seifullin, a Commission for the Development of the Air Fleet in Kazakhstan was established. Six years later, in 1929, passenger air services began between Semipalatinsk and Almaty. Over time, flying clubs began to appear in cities, and piloting gradually became a fashionable and highly sought-after profession. Among the first Kazakh pilots, the names most often cited are Joldazbek Nurymov, Jakypbek Maldybaev, and Talgat Begeldinov.
True fame among women pilots belongs to Khiuaz Dospanova, the first Kazakh female aviator. She was born into a family of fishermen in a village near Atyrau and completed her schooling in Uralsk. While still in high school, she obtained a pilot’s certificate at the Uralsk Flying Club and later applied to the Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy, but was not admitted because it accepted only male students. She then decided to pursue a medical career, but the outbreak of the Second World War changed her path.
In 1942, Dospanova joined the legendary all-female aviation regiment known as the Night Witches, and she flew combat missions across the entire war front. On one such mission, on her way back to the base, her aircraft collided in mid-air with that of her squadron commander, and both planes crashed. Dospanova survived but suffered fractures in both legs. During her recovery, the doctors discovered that her bones had healed incorrectly, and the only solution was to break them again and reset them. Despite enduring excruciating pain, she returned to flying and went on to finish the war near Berlin.
After the war, Khiuaz Dospanova became active in public and political life. She rose from an instructor in a district Party committee in her native West Kazakhstan to being the secretary of the Central Committee of the Komsomol (the Communist Youth League in the Soviet Union) of Kazakhstan. In 1951, she was elected a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic (Kazakh SSR) and, at its very first session, she was appointed the secretary of the Presidium. She later worked in the Almaty City Party Committee until her retirement.
Dospanova also made a significant contribution to the development of the infrastructure in Almaty by supporting the construction of such landmarks as the Medeu Skating Rink, the Central Stadium, the House of Scientists, the ‘Mountain Giant’ apple orchard, and the ‘Pioneer Palace’.
Khiuaz Dospanova had two sons, one of whom died at an early age. Her elder son, Yerbolat Amirov, lives in Almaty and teaches at Satbayev University. The memory of this outstanding pilot has been preserved in monuments, street names, and even entire villages. For example, the international airport in Atyrau bears the name of Khiuaz Dospanova. In addition, in 2012, one of Air Astana’s Embraer 190 aircraft was named in honor of Khiuaz Dospanova. The aircraft was later transferred to the FlyArystan fleet.
After the collapse of the USSR, Kazakhstan’s aviation industry had to be rebuilt practically from the ground up. A pivotal role in that process was played by Air Astana, which was founded in 2001 as a joint venture between Kazakhstan’s Samruk-Kazyna National Welfare Fund and the British aerospace company BAE Systems. Less than a year later, on 15 May 2002, Air Astana operated its first flight on the Almaty–Astana route. The airline began operations with three Boeing 737 aircraft, initially serving domestic routes across Kazakhstan before gradually expanding its network to international destinations such as Dubai, Istanbul, Moscow, Beijing, Frankfurt, and London. Today, the Air Astana group operates a fleet of 63 airliners and serves more than 130 domestic and international routes.
Today, Air Astana is not only the largest airline in Central Asia and the Caucasus, but also the most awarded. It offers a unique opportunity to fulfill the dream of flight—not only as a passenger, but also as a pilot.
Ab initio
In 2008, Air Astana launched the Ab initio program, an unparalleled initiative in Central Asia. It prepares future pilots at prestigious flight schools in Spain and Ireland, including FTE Jerez and AFTA Ireland, over the course of sixteen to eighteen months. The Ab initio program is open to any citizen of Kazakhstan between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four, whether they are a recent high school graduate, a university student, or an individual seeking a career change. Since its launch, more than 300 cadets have completed the training, with some progressing to the rank of captain, and currently fifteen female pilots fly for Air Astana.
The program is structured as a step-by-step pathway into commercial aviation. Cadets progress through theoretical training, flight practice, instrument flight rules (IFR), and multi-engine aircraft operations before joining Air Astana as first officers.
The airline covers the full cost of training, accommodation, meals, and flights, and cadets receive a stipend throughout the training period. As program graduates themselves will report, the rigors of selection and training are more than worth it because after their first flight, graduates feel truly elevated—as though they're already on cloud nine.