“Hoots and derision—which did not worry me at all,” Lilian Bland wrote, describing her visit to an air show in Blackpool, England, in 1909. She’d been telling everyone there that she intended to build and fly her own airplane. They were unimpressed. Bland was undeterred. She built a DIY plane of bamboo, wood and fabric, with a bicycle handlebar for steering and an engine she carried from England back to her home in Ireland. But would the Mayfly, as she called it, fly?

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EPISODE GUESTS

• Katherine LaGrave, deputy editor at AFAR media
• Dan Bubb, aviation historian and associate professor in residence at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas
• Paul Walsh, professor of aerospace engineering and director of the Centre for Advancing Engineering Research and Innovation in Aerospace Science at Toronto Metropolitan University. A big thank you to Professor Walsh for taking the time to answer our many questions about the science of flight in our interview and in follow-up emails.

HOST

• Katie Hafner

REPORTER/PRODUCER

Johanna Mayer

Johanna Mayer is a writer, producer, and sometimes-host working in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared on Science Friday, The Atlas Obscura Podcast, and The Sporkful, among other outlets.

SENIOR PRODUCER

Elah Feder 

Elah is a journalist, audio producer, and editor. Her work has appeared on Science Friday, Undiscovered, Science Diction, Planet Money, and various CBC shows. She has a masters from the University of Toronto, where she studied evolutionary biology, and later completed a masters at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism.

ART

• Art design: Keren Mevorach
• Picture credit: lilianbland.ie

FURTHER READING

• The “Flying Feminist” Who Was the First Woman to Design, Build, and Fly Her Own Plane, by Katherine LaGrave
• Lilianbland.ie - a website honoring Lilian Bland, including photos, articles, and correspondence.
• If you want to learn more about the science of flight, take a look at this NASA page giving the classic explanation of how planes achieve lift, but also see this Scientific American article challenging the idea that this explanation can fully account for lift. The debate is more complicated than we could give space to in the episode or resolve ourselves. You might find this discussion on Research Gate illuminating.
• Free Flight: Inventing the Future of Travel  by James Fallows, a journalist and pilot, who helped us refine our explanation of the science of flight.