How did Romania learn to fly?

Chapter

1872 – 1906

Born

17 August 1872, Surducu Mic

The patent

15 May 1903, no. 332106

The hop

18 March 1906, Montesson

In 1902 a thirty-year-old Banat man who had studied law stepped off the train in Paris, his notebooks full of a heavier-than-air machine: Traian Vuia, born on 17 August 1872 at Surducu Mic, in the Banat – then Austria-Hungary, today the Timiș village that bears his name. The machine in the notebooks would take off under its own power, on wheels, with no rails and no catapult.

On 17 February 1903 he laid a memoir before the French Academy; the Academy turned it away – the exact wording of the refusal is disputed, and this page claims none of it. Undeterred, Vuia patented the machine: French patent 332106, filed 15 May 1903 in the name of 'Trajan Vuia'. He built the bat-winged Vuia I and took it to the field at Montesson, by the Seine.

On 18 March 1906 the machine ran forward on its wheels and lifted: eleven metres by some accounts, twelve by others – the first take-off of a wheeled aeroplane under its own power. The Wright brothers had flown since December 1903, but from rails, with a catapult; Santos-Dumont's Paris flights came that autumn. L'Aérophile reported Vuia's trials in its October issue – the photographs on this page come from it.

Meanwhile The Academy memoir of 17 February 1903 was rejected – its exact wording is disputed.

Chapter

1882 – 1913

Born

19 November 1882, Binținți

Cotroceni

17 June 1910

Bănești

13 September 1913

In 1909, in the workshops of the Army Arsenal in Bucharest, Aurel Vlaicu's design was taking shape in wood and canvas: an aeroplane with the propeller at the back and the tail at the front, light and strange, which the Arsenal had agreed to build. Vlaicu had been born on 19 November 1882 at Binținți, in Transylvania – then Austria-Hungary; the village is now called Aurel Vlaicu – and after engineering studies abroad he had come home with the plans under his arm.

The Vlaicu I first left the ground at Cotroceni on 17 June 1910; that October he flew it at Băneasa too. Vlaicu II followed in 1911, and in June 1912 Vlaicu carried it to the International Flight Week at Aspern, outside Vienna: against some forty aviators, Roland Garros among them, he took first prize for dropping a projectile on a target and second, behind Garros, for precision landing – 7,500 krone in prizes by later accounts.

In September 1913 he set out to cross the Carpathians. Near Bănești, in Prahova county, his machine fell: 13 September 1913 – 31 August by the Old Style calendar. He was thirty. The Vlaicu III, built for the Marconi Company for aerial-radio experiments, was never finished.

Meanwhile 31 August Old Style is 13 September New Style – the crash in both calendars.

Chapter

1886 – 1934

Born

7 June 1886, Bucharest

The Salon

October 1910, Paris

The effect

Patented 1934

In a Paris workshop in the autumn of 1910, a twenty-four-year-old Bucharest man was tuning an aeroplane unlike any other: Henri Coandă, born on 7 June 1886, the son of General Constantin Coandă, artillery officer turned engineer. The Coandă-1910 was a sesquiplane with no propeller – a Clerget piston engine drove a multi-bladed centrifugal compressor, the 'turbo-propulseur', exhausting into a duct.

At the Second International Aeronautical Exhibition, in Paris in October 1910, it was the only exhibit without a propeller – and the sensation of the Salon. Coandă later claimed the machine had made an unscheduled hop at Issy in December 1910, ending in a crash; the historians Charles Gibbs-Smith and Frank Winter rejected the flight, and the Smithsonian's investigation sides with them. This page shows the Salon machine and marks the hop as disputed.

Coandă went on to build aeroplanes at Bristol from 1911 to 1914, then spent decades on the phenomenon he had noticed in the exhaust: a fluid jet clings to a curved surface. He patented the Coandă effect in 1934 – though Thomas Young had described it in 1800, 134 years before.

Meanwhile Thomas Young described the effect in 1800 – 134 years before the patent.

Chapter

1913 – 1972

The museum

Geoagiu, since 1952

The airports

Băneasa, Otopeni, Timișoara

Coandă dies

25 November 1972, Bucharest

A visitor climbing to Geoagiu today, in the village now called Aurel Vlaicu, finds the birth house turned memorial in 1952, with a museum beside it since 1982; at Bănești, in Prahova, a monument marks where the Carpathian attempt ended. Vuia's name is kept at Surducu Mic – the village is now Traian Vuia, with its own memorial exhibition.

The airports carry them too: Băneasa is Aurel Vlaicu Airport, Otopeni became Henri Coandă in 2004, Timișoara is Traian Vuia. In Bucharest's Aviației district, three streets – Traian Vuia, Aurel Vlaicu, Henri Coandă – meet the city that watched Vlaicu fly.

Vuia died in Bucharest on 3 September 1950; Coandă, the longest-lived of the three, died there on 25 November 1972. Eleven metres at Montesson, a summer over Cotroceni, a propeller-less machine at the Salon: within four years, three Romanians had put their country on the map of flight.

Meanwhile No Montesson or Issy plaque is claimed here – none was verified.