Cessna 150 - Version 1.1.3

Classic: Avion III - 1890/97

On October 14, 1897, Clément Ader was convinced that he would become the protagonist of a historic event. The celebrated inventor rested in the entrails of the creature which he had named Aquilon, The Avion III. Two great wings that bear like a bat, half-drilled. In the center, a cabin and two steam engines, each with 20 horsepower, leagues to two front propellers, each with four blades, styled.
After two days of trying, after a short run, he was caught in a wind gust, left the lane and stopped. He flew for about 300 meters without proving the controllability of his plane. After that, the French army withdrew its funding, but kept the results a secret. After the Wright brothers made their flight, the commission released an official account in November 1910, confirming Ader's attempts but asserting that they were unsuccessful.

Clément Agnès Ader (Muret, April 2, 1841 - Toulouse, May 3, 1925) was a French engineer, precursor of aviation and inventor of the term airplane (1890).
In spite of being a controversial subject, it is attributed to him by some historians the flight of the first motorized machine heavier than the air in 1890. The controversy is due to the ignorance of the actual control capability and stability of the machine, which could be virtually uncontrolabe in the air.
Phrases of Clément Ader: "The flight of birds and insects always worried me ... I had studied all kinds of wings of birds, bats and insects arranged in beating wings or fixed wing with propeller ... I discovered the important universal curve of flight or lift. "

Each update (classic) of Pilot Handbook VR, you'll have a new curiosity related to the aviation evolution history. So, see you there and Keep fLYing!!

Sources:
Wikipedia - Clément Ader - https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cl%C3%A9ment_Ader
Nogueira, Salvador 1979-Conexão Wright Santos Dumont: a verdadeira história da invenção do avião / Salvador Nogueira. - Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2006. ISBN 85-01-07488-8

Cessna 150 - Version 1.1.1/1.1.2

Classic: The Double-Deck Machine - 1896/97

Chanute glider of 1896, a biplane hang glider designed and built by American aviation pioneers Octave Chanute and Augustus Herring, in Chicago during the early summer of 1896. Along with the standard glider flown by Otto Lilienthal of Germany, the Chanute glider, designed by Chanute but also incorporating the ideas of his young employee Herring with regard to automatic stability, was the most influential of all flying machines built before the Wright brothers began designing aircraft. Herring, who shared the piloting duties, made dozens of flights with the elegant little glider in the Indiana Dunes during August and September 1896. On the best of these trials, they covered distances of a little more than 350 feet (109 metres), remaining in the air for 10 to 14 seconds. Herring returned on August 1897 to the dunes in Dune Park, near Michigan Lake, on his own, with a new version of the biplane glider, reporting flights of up to 600 feet (180 metres).

Octave Chanute, (born Feb. 18, 1832, Paris, France—died Nov. 23, 1910, Chicago, Ill., U.S.), leading American civil engineer and aeronautical pioneer. Immigrating to the United States with his father in 1838, he corresponded with aeronautical experimenters around the world, gathering trustworthy information on the history of flight research that he published as Progress in Flying Machines (1894).
Chanute had applied a trussing system drawn from bridge architecture that enabled an engineer to calculate the strength of the aircraft structure. The Chanute glider provided Wilbur and Orville Wright with a starting point for their own structural designs. Chanute befriended the Wright brothers, pursued an extensive correspondence with them, and visited their camp on the Outer Banks of North Carolina between 1901 and 1903.
Wilbur Wright remarked, “represented a very great structural advance, as it was the first in which the principles of the modern truss bridge were fully applied to flying machine construction.”

Each update (classic) of Pilot Handbook VR, you'll have a new curiosity related to the aviation evolution history. So, see you there and Keep fLYing!!

Sources:
Encyclopedia Britannica - Chanute glider of 1896 - https://www.britannica.com/topic/Chanute-glider-of-1896#ref934275
Encyclopedia Britannica - Octave Chanute - https://www.britannica.com/biography/Octave-Chanute
Nogueira, Salvador 1979-Conexão Wright Santos Dumont: a verdadeira história da invenção do avião / Salvador Nogueira. - Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2006. ISBN 85-01-07488-8