Invented, built and piloted by a Romanian. Aurel Vlaicu, the first flight
On June 17, 1910, Aurel Vlaicu wrote one of the great pages of aviation in our country, flying, for the first time, with a designed, built and piloted device.
In 1911, Aurel Vlaicu designed and built at the arsenal of the Army ‘Vlaicu II’, an improved variant of the flight apparatus became famous in June 1910. In 1912-1913 he conceived the « Vlaicu III » plane, which he did not start to build.
The aeroplan built by Aurel Vlaicu was first removed on June 12, 1910. On June 16, an unsuccessful flight attempt took place. One day later, on June 17, 1910, after two other unsuccessful attempts in which he raised without rising, Aurel Vlaicu returns to his group of friends, explaining why he had failed. Motivating the fact that he had not acted properly the controls of the device, Vlaicu makes a new attempt to fly.
Happy that he had made his dream, Aurel Vlaicu would declare in an article entitled ‘Impressions from Văzduh’, published in the magazine ‘Flacăra’ on October 29, 1911: ‘The biggest joy, but I felt it when I first flew to Cotroceni. I did not get up then four meters above. However, the Alps did not imagine them as the height I had risen to. Because four meters were then a formidable record for me, a record that devoted my car. I had flown. And that was the main one. ‘, Shows on the site magazinteflacara.ro.
Engineer, genius and pioneer inventor of Romanian and World Aviation, a post-mortem honorary member of the Romanian Academy, Aurel Vlaicu was born on November 6/19, 1882, in Binti (locality, currently bears his name), near Orăștie, Hunedoara County.
He had, from an early age, inclinations to the technique, and in the primary school in his native village he was known as a very inventive spirit, repairing clocks and trying to build small ‘perpetuum mobile’ machines. During the high school studies, carried out in Orăștie and Sibiu, according to the « dictionary of the members of the Romanian Academy » (Encyclopedic Ed./Ed. Romanian Academy, 2003), Aurel Vlaicu became concerned about the problem of mechanical flight, building different mechanisms and models of glorious. He attended higher technical courses in Vienna and Munich. During the stay in Munich, he designed the first flying wings, acted by bows, but abandoned this convinced project being that the future is represented by the aeroplanes operated by the engines, according to http://www.orastieinfo.ro/.
In 1908, he was, for a short time, an engineer at the Opel car factory in Russelsheim. He returns to the country in the same year, in the native village of Binti, where he projects and builds, a year later, one of the first Romanian gliders, called ‘Vlaicu-1909’.
On October 28, 1948, he was elected a post-mortem honorary member of the Romanian Academy. Along with Henri Coandă, Traian Vuia and other famous names, Aurel Vlaicu is one of the precursors of modern aeronautics and one of the parents of world aviation.
