The fastest glider ever flown was the Space Shuttle
Returning from orbit, the Space Shuttle had no engine thrust to land with. It plunged back into the atmosphere at nearly Mach 25, around 28,200 kilometres per hour, and then glided the rest of the way down. That makes it both the fastest fixed-wing aircraft on record and, by a huge margin, the fastest glider.
Air-breathing records are slower but still startling. On 16 November 2004 NASA's uncrewed X-43A, a scramjet-powered research craft that generates lift with its body, reached Mach 9.68. The rocket-powered X-15 still holds the crewed record at Mach 6.7, set on 3 October 1967, and the SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance jet hit 3,530 kilometres per hour on 28 July 1976, the top speed for a crewed jet.
Size records are just as lopsided. By volume the largest aircraft, as of 2016, was the British Airlander 10, a 92 metre hybrid blimp claimed to stay aloft for two weeks carrying 10 tonnes. The heaviest was the Soviet-built Antonov An-225 Mriya of the 1980s, with an 88 metre wingspan and a record cargo of more than 194 tonnes. Howard Hughes's wooden H-4 Hercules, nicknamed the Spruce Goose, had a wider wingspan than any aircraft flying today, yet its entire flying career was a single brief hop after the war, never rising clear of ground effect.
Humans reached the sky slowly. Kites in China several centuries BC count as the first human-made flight, and Chinese sky lanterns, tiny hot-air balloons, predate the 3rd century BC. The Montgolfier brothers' hot-air balloon led to crewed flights in the late 18th century, and revolutionary France formed military balloon companies. George Cayley built the first glider able to carry a person and identified the four main aerodynamic forces.
The Wright brothers flew the first aeroplane in 1903, and the familiar layout with a cross-shaped tail was settled by 1909. Zeppelin's rigid airships ruled long-distance flight until flying boats took over ocean routes in the 1930s, and after the Second World War land-based planes with better propellers, then jets, replaced them. Computer controls now make inherently unstable shapes such as flying wings practical.
Source: Aircraft
