The first successful human flight was performed by the wright brothers in the 20th century, but before their successful attempt there were a lot of unsuccessful examples of people trying to fly.
If the wright brothers did flight well, then I guess you could call the people mentioned here the wrong brothers
Starting off in the year 1010 when a Turkish scholar Ismail ibn Hammad al-Jawhari had attempted to fly from the roof of a mosque using a contraption consisting of 2 wooden wings and a rope… wood is heavy so he did not fly or even glide very well.
According to what i’ve found online, he did this flight attempt for one of the following reasons: 1 is he had been inspired by the wing suit of an earlier inventor who had covered himself in feathers before and wanted to try and improve on the design
2. He was delusional and thought he was a bird.
The next guy is Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier.
He was a pioneer of air travel, in 1783 he was involved in the air balloon flight of a sheep, a cockerel and a duck.
I imagine trying to teach them to fly the balloon was a challenge.
Jean – “Okay guys, to fly up you need to pull this toggle okay”
SHEEP – “Baaaa”
JEAN – “I cant understand you, What does that mean?”
Jean had quite a few highly successful flights, he was actually the first person to have a successful flight with a hot air balloon.
When the air balloon was invented it had never been tested before with humans so they didnt know if it would end up crashing and killing the people flying it, so because of this danger The original first people who were meant to take the first air balloon flight were 2 convicted criminals. But it just seems like a terrible idea to provide 2 dangerous criminals with a means to escape France, especially with a one of a kind transport that was unreachable by any police force at the time.
Policeman: “HEY YOURE UNDER ARREST”
Criminals (whilst in the sky in a hot air balloon): “OKAY PUT THE HANDCUFFS ON US THEN”
Policeman: “COME DOWN FIRST PLEASE”
Criminals (still in the sky in a hot air balloon): “NO”
However while jean did fly the air balloon first, he was also was the first known fatality of an air balloon crash when the balloon he had built crashed during June of 1785 while he and another balloon pilot attempted to fly across the channel from France to England
And Honestly I think death is a fair punishment for anyone who would willingly travel to Britain.
BALLOON PARTNER: “Hey jean, where are we headed today?
JEAN: “England”
BALOON PARTNER: “NO, NOOOO, I WONT GO”
BALLOON PARTNER proceeds to crash the ballon so they do not get to England
Franz Reichelt was a tailor who had become fascinated with creating a coat that could also be used as a parachute.
You can already see where this is going can’t you?
He really wanted to make sure that his coat parachute worked, so he decided to test it. I bet he tested it from a reasonable height that wasn’t incredibly high up and dangerous….
He went on to test it from the top of the Eiffel Tower.
So in 1912 he jumped from a high point of the Eiffel tower equipped with his coat parachute. Oh yeah, did I mention this was his first trial attempt with this suit too?
The suit didn’t work and He fell to his death. Before climbing the tower he had told authorities not to worry because he was using a mannequin to test the parachute suit first.
That was evidently a lie.
However a similar suit was later used by extreme sport enthusiasts such as base jumpers, and it allows them to glide around pretty well. A lot of these people also die too, maybe humans just weren’t supposed to fly
Okay so now its 1912 and we are at the point where the wright brothers have successfully shown us all how to fly safely, so surely people from this point onwards will have learned and there will be no more flight related deaths anymore…
Nope that didn’t happen.
Here are some more flight related death of people killed by their own aircraft builds.
Henry Smolinski created a company that’s mission was to turn ford pintos into flying cars with wings, this product was called the AVE Mizar. during a test flight of this vehicle, amazingly… it stalled and crashed
Also another fun fact about Henry, he went to the Northrop Institute of Technology which I think is a cool name because if you go there you can say you went to N I T which sounds similar to MIT.
Mike Hughes, who was also popularly know as “Mad” Mike Hughes was a daredevil who had been carrying out ridiculous stunts, mostly with self built steam propelled rockets that he would launch himself into the sky in.
these steam rockets were quite expensive to build though and he was lacking funding for them, so then he had an idea.
Again living up to his name of “mad mike huges” He then became part of the flat earth movement and acquired 7000 dollars of funding to build a giant rocket that could go up high enough to disprove the curvature of the earth and prove that the earth is actually flat.
It didn’t go so well, when he tried to go up, the parachute was deployed early and he died.
Also the earth is still round
So if any of you are afraid of flying in a plane and someone asks you why, just look them dead in the eye and say: “Did you know that in 1025 a Turkish scholar fell to his death when trying to fly?”
You’re welcome!
KAI HAYES STONE 
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