Pioneers and Milestones of Slovene Aviation - Franz Wels

Pioneers of Slovene Aviation

The beginnings of unpowered flight – Franc Wels

Flight is one of the most important phenomena of life on our planet and is around 150 million years old (the Archaeopteryx genus of bird-like dinosaurs). It has existed throughout every period of history, with or without human involvement. Since nature deprived man of wings, he has had to rely on engineering. The flight of birds was for a long time an inspiration for human endeavours in this direction, until because of its impossibility it became more of an obstacle than a model.

In around the year 1500, the great artist, scientist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci sketched a series of human-powered flying machines, although he came to realise that this method would not be successful. A new possibility appeared in the eighteenth century with the principle of lighter-than-air flight – or balloons (the Montgolfier brothers, 1783). The remainder of the eighteenth century was characterised by aerostats (lighter-than-air aircraft). At the same time, however, advances were being made with heavier-than-air flying machines, which resulted, in the late nineteenth century, in the first successful flights with gliders (Otto Lilienthal, 1896) and eventually in powered flight (the Wright brothers, 1903).

In the period that followed, innovative aviation became one of the fastest developing spheres of transport and engineering.

No account of early successful unpowered flights around the world would be complete without a mention of the achievements in this field of the engineer FRANZ WELS (b. Maribor, 1873; d. Vienna, 1940). His designs for wings took inspiration from nature and he built several large models based on the wing-shaped seeds of a tropical creeper known as Alsomitra macrocarpa, eventually building a full-sized glider or flying wing which in 1906 successfully flew a distance of 250 metres. After teaming up with the Austria aviation pioneer Igo Etrich, Wels began working on a motorised version of his flying wing. Etrich’s workshop went on to manufacture its first powered aircraft and, most notably, the Taube (Dove), a successful design that would be used by the Austrian and German air forces in the First World War.

Sandi Sitar,

engineering historian