Flight

VHS cover

*Flight* is the first episode of the third season of Eyewitness. The topic of the episode is about the mechanics and forces of flight involved in both flying animals such as birds and insects and in human flying machines. The episode aired on 15th September 1997.

*Flight* is based on a book first titled ‘Flying Machine’ that was first published in 1990 and has been republished several times, including when the book was rebranded as Flight in 2011.

## Episode

### Introductory sequence

A laggar falcon flies up and disappears into the glare of the sun; immediately three fighter jets fly out of the glare and swoop over the camera; the last one leaving behind smoke which leaves the screen white.

### Episode outline

Click here for the full transcript for Flight.

We’ve always longed to fly like the birds and join the other creatures that defy gravity; the story of man’s conquest of the air spans the ages. Kites were the first solid expression of the longing for flight and man-lifting kites were, for centuries, the only way for humans to get off the ground and join the birds.

For a bird, flight comes naturally. Flight is sustained and controlled movement through the air. A drifting feather is not capable of flight but does reveal the substance on which all flight depends, air. Earth’s atmosphere is a blanket, several kilometres thick. Evolution has taken advantage of this medium for travel. Three hundred million years before humans, the air was alive with flying insects. Flight has many advantages, allowing a quick escape from predators and the ability to travel far and wide in search of food. Later, pterosaurs took to the skies and from the same evolutionary path came the birds with their far more complex wings. Yet more insects and flying mammals, bats, came later.

It was the birds that man dreamed of following into the sky. In Greek legend two men, Daedalus and his son Icarus, fashioned wings from feathers and wax. Icarus flew too high in his excitement, the wax on his wings melted and he fell into the sea and drowned. The Egyptian goddess Isis could fly like a bird. For ancient Egyptians, flight was the pathway to heaven and the soul’s flight from the grave was represented by the Ba, a hawk with a human head. Wings on a human confer an angelic existence. In Persian myth, a king was said to have been able to fly by tethering starving eagles to his throne and tempting them with meat.

If we couldn’t harness the birds, at least we could study and observe them. More than 9,000 bird species can fly, so surely, we could too. Around 1,000 AD Eilmer, an English monk, built himself some wings and launched himself from the monastery wall. Eilmer broke both legs in the fall and being lame forever after. Other medieval tower jumpers tried to fly as well, with only questionable claims of success.

Even a natural-born flyer must master two skills at once – generating forward motion or thrust and upward motion or lift. Bird wings generate thrust and lift, streamlining counteracts resistance and muscle power propels the structure of lightweight bones. Feathers are what make a bird a bird. Feathers and wings are potent symbols – wings grant power to mythical creatures, while native Americans and ancient Egyptians used feathers as symbols of victory and purity. Would-be birdmen seized on the feather as the key to flight, so their wings were covered with feathers. Meanwhile, Leonardo Da Vinci designed a human-powered flying machine called the ornithopter. But Da Vinci missed the essential fact that humans are made to walk, while birds are made to fly. Birds are able to get into the air by simply facing into the wind and opening their wings. Gliders operate with the same principle.

Both birds and gliders fly because of the shape of the wing, a shape essential to all flight. As air meets the wing, some goes above and some under, but the air passing over the longer upper surface has to go faster than the air going under the wing. Where air travels faster, pressure is reduced so there’s greater pressure below the wing and it is pushed up. This is known as lift. Birds have different shaped wings for different styles of flight. Every flying machine has to generate air speed across the wing. Birds can do it by flapping, so how could humans do the same? Two hundred years after Da Vinci another Italian thinker, Giovanni Borelli, came to the conclusion that human chest muscles were simply too small to propel us forward. To fly, a human would need the thigh muscles of a body-builder transferred to the chest, the legs of a ten-year-old and the wingspan of a light aircraft. Even a century after Borelli’s observations, would-be-fliers were still taking long falls to the ground.

A better option, perhaps, was to use hot air. In the 1780s two Frenchmen, the Montgolfier brothers of Paris, created a balloon and tested it with three farm animals. When they landed safely, ballooning took off. It was soon the Parisian social climbers’ favourite means of ascent, with two men even flying across the English Channel although they had to lose their clothes to save weight and landed in their underwear. For a century, balloons were the only way to fly unless you were a bird.

By four weeks of age, a dove’s chest muscles are so well-developed it can begin to take to the air. Birds can fly at great heights, remain on the wing for years at a time, travel at great speed or slow in the air to a virtual walk without stalling. But the dream of human flight often stalled.

Contraptions like the aerial steam carriage may have flown, with something lighter than a steam engine powering them. Sir George Cayley used his coachman as an unwitting pilot for his glider. The glider flew the length of a field but when it crash-landed, the coachman quit. Some animals use a controlled glide to descend smoothly. For a bird, gliding saves energy. It uses only a twentieth of the energy needed for flapping wings but makes for slower travel. For human gliders speed is not the objective, but rather the spectacular views. At the end of the nineteenth century a young German, Otto Lilienthal, took aviation a step further with his glider. He launched himself into more than 2,000 successful flights and was on the brink of inventing a motorised glider when he died from injuries sustained in a crash.

The inventors who would fulfil his vision were the Wright Brothers, bicycle builders from America. They built their plane with a propellor, a wooden frame and a lightweight motor, with the power connected to the propellor with bicycle chains. When their plane flew one historic day in 1903, the Wrights had made one of the greatest human achievements ever. The maiden flight did not travel very far, fight or fast, but the Wright Brothers had proved that powered flight was possible.

It took them five years, while a dove can fly perfectly after only five weeks. An aeroplane’s fixed wing is a primitive invention compared to nature’s designs. A bird’s wing allows it to twist and turn, recover from errors, slow down without stalling, swoop and dive. An eagle uses its wing-tip feathers to change the air flow over the wing, while a plane needs mechanical flaps. All birds can angle their wings to allow them to safely slow down, with an aeroplane’s edge slats doing the same thing. A bird’s tail feathers and a plane’s rudder help control speed and direction. By 1917, the first aircraft had the beginnings of such refinements.

Soon the marvel of flight became a means of destruction, with ingenuity accelerated by war. Nearly a century ago a Dutchman, Anthony Fokker, invented a machine gun that could fire between the blades of a spinning propellor. Design innovations pushed the aeroplane’s maximum altitude to forty times higher in just four years. But the reality of human flight had not yet convinced the world at large with the US Patent Office refusing to accept patents for heavier-than-air flying machines, believing such devices were physically impossible.

The Patent Office had perhaps failed to notice that nature’s own flying machines are heavier than air, even in the world of insects. Insects have different wing designs, such as the ladybird with wing covers, four-winged dragonflies and two-winged mosquitoes. The fly has a name that says it all, being able to even do a cartwheel to land upside-down. Many secrets of insect flight are still barely understood. Bees seem to defy the laws of physics, with their tiny wings lifting their large body weight. Minute holes in the wings may be what provides the extra lift.

Inspired by such accomplished fliers, human aviation copied nature’s spinning design to create the helicopter, an idea first toyed with in the fifteenth century. Four centuries later and spinning wings provided lift for an early prototype of the helicopter that flew at around knee-height. A Spaniard, Juan de la Cierva, invented the autogyro. Instead of fixed wings, it had a free-spinning rotor and a motor to supply forward thrust. If the motor failed, the rotor allowed it to drift safely to the ground. The modern helicopter has power-driven rotors that allow it to fly vertically and hover, blades that can be angled to provide lift and the whole assembly tilted to fly forwards and backwards or to turn. A small tail rotor keeps the helicopter from whirling around. The helicopter is the most versatile flying machine humans have designed.

Early fixed-wing flight remained exhilarating, because of the open cockpit. Flying takes immense skill. A pilot must control three types of motion – roll, pitch and yaw – all while keeping the aeroplane on course. Birds are masters of navigation, while human pilots have no natural magnetic compasses or migratory memories to follow. Even crude instruments were lifesavers, like the sighting strip that orientated early aviators to the horizon. In darkness or bad weather without a visible horizon, a pilot can become disorientated. Only the invention of the gyroscopic artificial horizon solved that problem. Pilots needed all the help they could get, with many flying with a medallion of Saint Joseph of Cupertino, patron saint of flight. But of the first 40 airmail pilots in the USA, 31 were killed. Charles Lindbergh was one of the survivors, with his epic solo flight over the Atlantic firing the public’s fervour for flying.

Almost as soon as planes were invented, people started inventing ways to jump out of them. The first parachutist jumped from a balloon in 1797 and brought on the first recorded case of airsickness. In a glamorous new era of air travel, passengers had to be made more comfortable. Rickety wicker chairs gave way to upholstered seats and the experience of dining in the air.

The technology of flight continued to mirror the world of nature found in the air and under the sea. The squid is nature’s version of a jet engine. The squid squeezes water out of an inbuilt nozzle to push against the sea and travel forward. Jets require a lot of air and can make a lot of noise. Jet travel has shrunk the world. Transatlantic travel took many weeks by sailing ship, five to fourteen days by steam ship, two and a half days by airship, twenty-nine hours by early passenger plane and just three hours on the supersonic Concorde, 300 times faster than the sailing ship. To fly much faster, we would need to leave Earth’s atmosphere. By this method, travellers could fly from England to China in just 45 minutes. A large city like London has, on average, 3,000 passengers overhead at any given moment. To keep them safe means borrowing a fifty-million-year-old trick from bats, radar. But even with our sophisticated inventions, we cannot match the acrobatics of nature’s flying creatures. Our envy shows in the names of our flying machines – the Hawk, Mosquito, Eagle, Tiger Moth and Falcon each pay tribute to an animal’s skills. Inspired by birds, bats and insects, humans have made the air their own and pushed the boundaries of speed and endurance. We have even claimed the elusive prize of human flight using only human power. In 1988 the Daedalus Project, named after that would-be flyer of Greek legend, perfected a type of flying bicycle that was slow but managed the distance between the Greek island of Crete and its neighbour Santorini. The rewards of powered flight have been amazing but for efficiency, stamina and sheet beauty, the planet’s greatest aviators remain nature’s own masters of flight.

## Animal species filmed for the programme

### Studio footage

* Laggar falcon, *Falco jugger*
* Barbary dove, *Streptopelia risoria*
* Asian water dragon, *Physignathus cocincinus*
* Domestic chicken, *Gallus domesticus*
* Harris’s hawk, *Parabuteo unicinctus*
* Mallard, *Anas platyrhynchos*
* Domestic sheep, *Ovis aries*
* Catalina macaw, *Ara ararauna × A. macao*
* Great eggfly butterfly, *Hypolimnas bolina*

### Stock footage

* Atlantic puffin, *Fratercula arctica*
* White tern, *Gygis alba*
* Common starling, *Sturnus vulgaris*
* Emperor dragonfly, *Anax imperator*
* Banded demoiselle damselfly, *Calopteryx splendens*
* Black garden ant, *Lasius niger*
* Migratory locust, *Locusta migratoria*
* Mexican free-tailed bat, *Tadarida brasiliensis*
* Snow goose, *Anser caerulescens*
* European goldfinch, *Carduelis carduelis*
* Mallard, *Anas platyrhynchos*
* Domestic horse, *Equus ferus caballus*
* Flying fox, *Pteropus sp*.
* Pied kingfisher, *Ceryle rudis*
* Wandering albatross, *Diomedea exulans*
* Magnificent frigatebird, *Fregata magnificens*
* South Polar skua, *Stercorarius maccormicki*
* Northern gannet, *Morus bassanus*
* White-booted racket-tail, *Ocreatus underwoodii*
* Barn swallow, *Hirundo rustica*
* White-tailed sea eagle, *Haliaeetus albicilla*
* Grey-headed albatross, *Thalassarche chrysostoma*
* Lesser flamingo, *Phoeniconaias minor*
* Greylag goose, *Anser anser*
* Mute swan, *Cygnus olor*
* Ruppell’s griffon vulture, *Gyps rueppelli*
* Common swift, *Apus apus*
* Peregrine falcon, *Falco peregrinus*
* Gliding tree frog, *Agalychnis spurrelli*
* Red giant flying squirrel, *Petaurista petaurista*
* Golden tree snake, *Chrysopelea ornata*
* Red-footed booby, *Sula sula*
* Bald eagle, *Haliaeetus leucocephalus*
* Eyed ladybird, *Anatis ocellata*
* Common blue damselfly, *Enallagma cyathigerum*
* Mosquito, *Anopheles sp*.
* Common housefly, *Musca domestica*
* Bluebottle, *Calliphora vomitoria*
* Western honeybee, *Apis mellifera*
* Domestic cattle, *Bos taurus*
* Rock dove, *Columba livia*
* Arctic tern, *Sterna paradisaea*
* Squid, Decapodiformes
* Brown long-eared bat, *Plecotus auritus*
* Common kestrel, *Falco tinnunculus*
* Whooper swan, *Cygnus cygnus*
* Grasshopper, Orthoptera
* Egyptian fruit bat, *Rousettus aegyptiacus*
* African fish eagle, *Haliaeetus vocifer*

## Stock footage sources

Wright Brothers’ First Flight (1903) – Wright Brothers’ sequence

The Living Planet: Jungle (1984) - Golden tree snake

Wildlife on One: Flying Foresters (1992) - Flying fox

## Credits

* Director - Caius Julyan
* Writer - Anne MacLeod
* Music - Guy Dagul
* Graphics Director - Morgan Almeida
* Graphics Design - Piers Helm
* Camera - Nick Squires and Jim Fyans
* Set Design and Visual Effects - Chris Reynolds and Mike Tucker
* Research - Inge Samuels
* Production Co-ordinator - Maryrose Upjohn
* Production Team - Louisa Bowman, Philip Whelman and Jackie Byrne
* Unit Manager - Jackie Williamson
* 3-D Animation - Paul Kavanagh and Andy McNamara
* Videotape Editor - Malcolm Cowan
* Dubbing Mixer - Peter Collins and Kian Wong
* With thanks to:
	+ Anglia Television
	+ Sikorsky

## Making this programme

Flight is partly covered in The Making of Eyewitness 3: Worlds. Replicas of biplanes were brought into the studio and suspended before being filmed in front of a chroma key blue background which could then be replaced with a different background. With the help of some camera moves and a wind machine, the plane miraculously takes flight. In the computer, the graphic designer removes the blue background and replaces it with sky.

## Home media releases

Uniquely among the Eyewitness VHS, Flight had two different covers - one has a common kingfisher as the main cover image, while the other has a Eurasian nuthatch. As well as being released on VHS, Flight was released as a DVD in the USA and as one of the free DVDs provided with the UK's Daily Mirror newspaper.

The alternative VHS cover for FlightEyewitness Flight Daily Mirror DVD coverFlight America-release DVD cover

**Writing staff**: Anne MacLeod • Ben Southwell • Ben Steiner • Brian Meehl • David Hanson • David Stafford • David Helton • George Bloom • Lynette Singer • Mike Tomlinson • Paul Thomas • Stan Cullimore
**Directors**: Gavin Maxwell • Justine Kershaw • David Hutt • Andrew Jackson • Justin Hardy • Ludo Graham • Jerry Foulkes • Derek Hall • Sanjida O'Connell • Caius Julyan • Bonni Cohen • Leanne Pooley • Edwina Vardey • Alexandra Beazley • Sam Hodgkin • Karen Walsh • Jack Weber • Richard Simkin • Alex Hearle • Brian Cummins • Ben Southwell
**Composers**: Guy Michelmore (season one) • Guy Dagul (seasons two and three)

**Season One**: Cat • Fish • Horse • Dog • Jungle • Bird • Amphibian • Insect • Shark • Elephant • Reptile • Dinosaur • Skeleton
**Season Two**: Desert • Tree • Ape • Mammal • Butterfly and Moth • Volcano • Rock and Mineral • Seashore • Pond and River • Weather • Arctic and Antarctic • Prehistoric Life • Shell
**Season Three**: **Flight** • Bear • Sight • Island • Survival • Mountain • Monster • Human Machine - Plant • Ocean • Planets • Life • Natural Disasters