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People had been experimenting with motorised flying machines for some time. As you know in 1912 the Royal Flying Corps was formed in England. The Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur, had managed the first flight in December 1903 in the United States. Orville was at the controls as Wilbur had been pilot on an earlier unsuccessful attempt and they were taking it in turns. The first flight was about 100 metres and at a height of 10 metres.
By the end of the war flights were much longer and, in 1919, at about 1,15pm on June 14, two British aviators, John Alcock and Arthur Brown, took off from an airfield in Newfoundland in Canada. The next morning, at 8.40am, they landed in County Galway in Ireland having made the first ever non-stop aircraft flight across the Atlantic Ocean. As you can see, landing in a field has its problems. Alcock was the pilot and Brown the navigator who had some problems when they encountered fog and he couldn't use his instruments to plot their course.
After they landed they were treated as heroes. They won several prizes including £10,000 from the Daily Mail, probably about half a million pounds today, and were knighted by King George V at Windsor Castle. Sadly flying was still a very dangerous occupation and Alcock was killed in December of 1919 when the plane he was flying crashed into the ground in France. He was on his way to the Paris Air Show in a new amphibious plane. Amphibious means it could land on sea or land. Brown lived until 1948.
Talking of seaplanes, other people were also working on flying in something called an airship. Basically this was a big balloon filled with hydrogen (science note: hydrogen is lighter than air so it floats) with passengers either within the balloon or underneath. These machines had some advantages, they were nice and quiet, but some disadvantages, hydrogen catches fire very, very easily.
In 1929 Britain built 2 airships the R100 and the R101. The R101 was 223 metres long and went through several test flights. However, on its first overseas voyage it crashed and immediately caught fire on October 5 1930 in France. 48 of the 54 people on board died including many of the design team and the Air Minister, Lord Thomson. This was virtually the end of British airship development.
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