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| | Programmes on Radio 4 to mark
100 Years of Human Flight | |
Afternoon Readings: Take Off
Monday 15 - Friday 19 December, 3.30pm
It's 100 years since the Wright Brothers took to the air on December 17th 1903 and the world has never been the same since. We head into the blue with Daniele del Giudice's Take Off, a sublime meditation on the experience of flight.
From the author's first, nerve-wracking, solo flight to a ghostly visitation on a night-time air field and the literary reconstruction of the last fatal moments of a doomed airliner; the short stories in Take Off remind us that the world up there is a mysterious place where nothing can be taken for granted and everything changes all the time.
Read by Simon Russell Beale, these five short stories carry you up into the world of the clouds, a world governed by different laws where one mistake can be fatal.
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The Afternoon Play: Tarnished Wings
Tuesday 16 December, 2.15pm
In the First World War a flyer hangs between life and death as his plane hurtles towards the ground. A strange vision, combined with echoes of the poems of Jeffrey Day help him to come to a decision about whether to live or die.
Meanwhile, in 2003, a young heroin addict, Alice, reads the poetry of Jeffery Day and contemplates suicide. She is transported back to 1917 by a reluctant angel, Jen, who seems like a modern-day child. In No Man's Land they find the suicidal pilot who thinks Day was writing about flying not dying.
The disillusionment of the young people with flying planes and flying high on drugs works in parallel and the young angel, who has herself met a brutal end, tries to change their minds and make them see that they have more than they thought to live for.
Although Day's poetry has always been considered a eulogy to flying, a much darker meaning can be interpreted from it. Having flown all through Black April, Day must have been in a dark state of mind by the time he wrote the poems, because he had lost so many friends.
Were his poems an enticement to death or glory? The two suicidal characters argue the toss, while the reluctant angel projects wisdom way beyond her years. Her mission is to talk them out of suicide and she cleverly uses each one's arguments against the other to convince them suicide is not the only solution.
Written by Carolyn Scott-Jeffs
Directed by Peter Leslie Wild
Cast
Jen - Natalia Keery-Fisher
Sam - James Howard
Alice - Emily Chennery
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The Afternoon Play: A Bird, A Heart, A Bicycle
Wednesday 17 December, 2.15pm
In December 1903, the Wright Brothers were the first men to achieve powered flight when their primitive plane took off over the dunes at Kitty Hawk. Or were they? Could it be that a lesser known English aristocrat, one Sydney Mangot Walsh, actually launched a plane just weeks before the Wright Brothers' more famous flight?
Peter Roberts's comedy takes a sideways look at the race to achieve powered flight towards the end of the Nineteenth Century. We meet the likes of Otto Lilienthal - the German who built an artificial hill in Berlin from which to launch his gliders and Hiram Maxim - the American who invented a machine gun, and then became convinced he had found the secret of flight.
Against this prodigious opposition, Walsh soldiers on, getting himself into more and more debt. He's so buried in his work that he fails to notice that his wife, the redoubtable Elspeth, is becoming closer and closer to his Black Country engineer, Ernest.
Written by Peter Roberts
Directed by Peter Leslie Wild
Cast
Walsh - Richard Derrington
Elspeth - Alison Pettitt
Old Elspeth - June Barrie
Ernest - Alex Jones
Otto Lilienthal/Hiram Maxim - Andrew Wincott
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The Wright Brothers: First Flight Special
Wednesday 17 December, 9.00pm
A programme presented from the beach at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, the site of the Wright Brothers' first historic flight exactly a century ago. The first flight is being re-enacted in an exact replica of Wilbur and Orville's flyer. They had success in 1903, but will today's aviators have the same good luck?
We join Wright Brothers' biographer James Tobin on the beach at Kitty Hawk amid a huge crowd as preparations are made for the re-enactment of the Wright Brothers' first flight. While we are waiting James tells the story of the two remarkable bicycle engineers from Dayton Ohio. We visit the shop they ran, the site of their old home and the flying field where they learned the business of powered flight. We talk to descendants of the family, grand niece and nephew Amanda and Steven Wright.
We also visit the massive air show at Oshkosh where, this summer, the world's aviators and aviation historians gathered to celebrate 100 years of flight. We hear from Wright expert Tom Crouch of the Smithsonian, from Chuck Yeager who was the first man to fly faster than the speed of sound and we get the feeling for the Wright flyer itself by taking a trip on a simulator.
The programme culminates back on the beach at Kitty Hawk and the moment when the modern Wright Flyer takes off...or not...
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The Material World
Thursday 18 December, 4.30pm
100 years after the first powered flight, engineers are designing the next generation of passenger craft. Will some be supersonic? Will there be 1000-seat jumbos or great flying wings? How will they land and take off? How will passengers board and evacuate quickly and safely and how will the planes be made quiet and fuel efficient? The Material World investigates the future of flight.
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