Brazilian Alberto Santos-Dumont made his first public flight over Paris on September 13, 1906. Unlike the Wright brothers with their Flyer 2, he did not need a catapult or a headwind to accelerate, which is why his flight is sometimes called the first in the history of modern aviation. All sorts of air shows and competitions in the air began to come into vogue.

In January 1908, the French aviator Henri Ferman won the competition for the distance of the flight, setting a record of 1 km (the judges did not know that three years earlier Orville Wright had already flown nearly 39 km over the expanses of the prairies). At this time, the desire to get a heavier-than-air aircraft again expressed by the British military. Now the designer John William Dunn took up the task. In December 1908 his machine D5 showed a much higher stability of the flight than even that which was demonstrated by the creation of brothers. The latter, however, in an unannounced competition between the two continents in May of the same year, first took aboard a passenger, a certain Charlie Furnas.

In July 1908, Léon Delagrange, wishing to surpass their achievement, flew in Milan 200 meters with a woman on board, and on September 17, 1908 the first plane crash occurred, resulting in the loss of lives. Thomas Selfridge, who was on board, died in the crash of an airplane piloted by Orville Wright, demonstrating his qualities to the U.S. military. The world certainly froze in anticipation of some significant event that would make it clear that aviation as a new human activity had taken place.

Also in 1908, the publisher of the English Daily Mail, Lord Northcliffe, announced a £1,000 prize for the first person to fly across the English Channel in an airplane. Wright did not enter the race and returned to his business in the United States.

In July 1909, a young Frenchman, Hubert Latham, took off, but the engine of his car stalled halfway and the pilot fell into the strait. The poor guy was pulled out of the water by French sailors.

Louis Blériot’s 37-year-old flying machine took off next on July 25, 1909. At first the wind blew it to the north, and the pilot had to level the course. Eventually, after spending 37 minutes in flight and covering 23 miles, Blériot landed safely in England. After that, all doubts about the aviation’s ability to handle serious tasks disappeared.

The value of Blériot’s victory was that it was achieved in a monoplane, the favorite child of French aviators, while the British and Americans preferred a biplane. Over the following month, Blériot received a hundred orders to produce the machine, which was his 11th model. While the Wright brothers spent years perfecting their planes, the French pilot preferred to change them.

“Blériot XI” was the most famous of them all. The following year the pilot set two world speed records on it, achieving first 74 km/h and then 77 km/h. Louis Blériot triumphed in front of half a million spectators at the Rheims show, beating Glenn Curtis. A year later the speed of Blériot exceeded 100 km/h. The plane was becoming the fastest vehicle known to man.

In Russia the next after A. Mozhaisky to design an airplane was attempted by E. P. Sverchkov in 1909. Tests were unsuccessful: the device failed to get off the ground, and it did not even budge. In 1912-1913 I.I. Sikorsky created the first in the world four-engine plane “Russian Vityaz” intended for strategic reconnaissance. Even specialists did not believe in the possibility of flight of such a machine, but on July 23, 1913 the plane with four engines set in one row and rotating each of its propellers (an absolute technical innovation of that time), took off and showed excellent controllability.