History of flight - Aviation Pioneers, Wright Brothers, Hot Air Balloons: The work of the Wright brothers inspired an entire generation of flying-machine experimenters in Europe and the Americas. The Brazilian experimenter Alberto Santos-Dumont, for instance, made the first public flight in Europe in 1906 in his 14-bis. Frenchman Henri Farman made his first flight the following year in the Farman III, a machine built by Gabriel Voisin. Farman also completed the first European circular flight of at least 1 km (0.62 mile) early in 1908. On July 4, 1908, the American Glenn Hammond Curtiss, a leading member of the Aerial Experiment Association (AEA), organized by Alexander Graham Bell, won the
“On 2 July 1937, Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan took off from Papua New Guinea, nearing the end of their record-setting journey around the world never to be seen again. Until today.”