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Those Magnificent Flying Machines
aka: Flying Machine

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"It's a Falling Machine. I'm so impressed."
Agatha Clay, Girl Genius

Once upon a time flying was not the relatively mundane commute that it is today, but an adventure into an unexplored realm, a victory over gravity that was long thought to be impossible. Flying machines were not the shiny, high-technology Cool Planes we regularly see in the sky nowadays, but fabulous contraptions cobbled together by Mad Scientists, sporting lots of spinny bits, belching smoke and fire, risky and magnificent.

This trope is for all flying machines that reflect this aesthetic, and this romantic way of looking at human flight. It is most usually found in Steampunk and Raygun Gothic works, but may also have a place in Fantasy and even Historical Fiction.

In more fantasy-oriented works, Sky Pirates may make use of their magnificent flying machines to plough the ocean of air in their search for prey. Floating Continents and a World in the Sky may or may not be involved; while magnificent flying machines can and do exist without them, Worlds in the Sky are very often host to such devices. Please don't try to take this trope too far into the realm of fantasy, though. Letting flight be entirely explained by magic, for example, would not have the same feel or meaning for the story. A flying ship kept airborne by a wizard's spell would not count as an example of this trope (though a flying ship that uses magic to drive a hundred tiny propellers very well might).

Generally, a magnificent flying machine will have one or several of the following features:

  • It will be powered by steam. Or bicycle pedals. Or simply the Rule of Cool.
  • It may have an inordinate number of wings. These may flap, and may be far too small to be what's really keeping it aloft.
  • It may also have lots of propellers, which may be corkscrew-shaped.
  • It will be a clear example of Bamboo Technology or, sometimes, Magitek.
  • It will have an open, fragile-looking frame, possibly with thin canvas wings and lots of machinery visible inside. Or its hull may be incredibly heavy-looking, totally un-aerodynamic, and studded with rivets.note 
  • It will have lots of spinning cogs and gears and other shiny moving parts.
  • Its designers probably Failed Engineering Forever.
  • And yet, against all odds... it will still fly.

Large examples may be Cool Airships — though Cool Airships don't always follow this aesthetic, and magnificent flying machines don't have to be large (or lighter-than-air). Or cool, necessarily. While usually these craft will be treated as impressive feats of engineering — as the title implies — in some settings a primitive-looking flying machine will be Played for Laughs (perhaps as an aeronautical version of The Alleged Car). Actual use of the term "flying machine" usually suggests humour.

Actual aircraft in the early days of aviation, as well as many early unsuccessful attempts to build flying machines, may well fit here. Leonardo da Vinci deserves special mention for dreaming up many fanciful aircraft in the early 16th century (several examples below were inspired by his work). The trope likely stopped applying to Real Life sometime between World War I and World War II, as airplanes gradually evolved towards their modern form, and as large rigid airships passed their heyday and fell into disuse.

See also: Useful Notes on airships.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Anime & Manga 
By creator:
  • Hayao Miyazaki's entire filmography: scenic flying sequences are a signature element, and he grew up around old airplanes in the factory operated by his father and uncle. See the Films — Animated folder below for cinematic examples.
    • Sherlock Hound has many examples, the biggest of which being Episode Five: 'The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle' where Moriarty uses a pink, Pterodactyl-shaped biplane as a distraction for a jewel heist and Episode Ten: 'The White Cliffs of Dover' concerning a rash of sabotages with the Royal Mail's air service to Europe and sees the return of the aforementioned Pterodactyl.
    • Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind has fanciful gliders and balloons.
By work:
  • The Daughter of Twenty Faces has a double-balloon airship that is definitely strange, Steampunk, and propeller-laden enough to count.
  • In Fullmetal Alchemist (2003), this is Ed's reaction to seeing the WWI planes of our world.
  • Last Exile and its sequel feature an assortment of Diesel Punk aircraft in both "fighter plane" and "battleship" sizes with the overall technology level of the early 20th century. They fly using anti-gravity engines powered by a mysterious ore, which are a surviving relic of a more enlightened age — as in, they can be built and replicated but the exact science behind them is long forgotten.
  • The first episode of Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water has Jean in Paris for a competition to demonstrate experimental flying machines, most of which are typical for 19th Century experimental aircraft in both looks and effectiveness. Jean's machine actually works, but he got disqualified for cutting in line so he could get airborne to save Nadia.
  • Eneru's Ark Maxim in One Piece. It's a huge boat with wings and lots of propellers. The primary power source is Eneru himself. The backup suspension system, should Eneru be otherwise occupied, is seashells — well, extinct Jet Dials, but still seashells. It's designed to take Eneru and four people of his choice to the moon... which it does, minus the extra passengers. Oh, and it's made of gold. Like, solid gold.

    Comic Books 
  • In De Cape et de Crocs, Bombastus builds a pedal-powered flying machine with flapping wings, all thanks to Bamboo Technology. Subverted in that halfway through the flight, he realizes that it's not actually working, just slowing their fall.
  • Lady Mechanika has the Lewis Flyer, which appears to be a steam-powered vintage car with ornithopter wings and a helicopter rotor that somehow still manages to fly.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (IDW):
    • In "Convocation of the Creatures", a large number of these are visible in the beginning of the comic as the various delegates arrive at the Hall of Unity, including airships topped with fully rigged sails and with gondolas as big as their gas envelopes, hot-air balloons, and a helicopter-like contraption. Of course, some winged creatures such as pegasi, bat ponies and dragons simply fly in under their own power.
    • Issue 81 features the story of Wind Sock, an earth pony who dreamed of flying with the Wonderbolts. To that end, he experimented with heavier-than-air flight, repeatedly building, crashing, and rebuilding. He ultimately built a glider reminiscent of Leonardo da Vinci's inventions, used it to rescue a trapped Wonderbolt, and was welcomed into their ranks. The comic ends with Rumble using a replica of his glider to fly in an air parade despite a sprained wing.
  • Starscream's alt-mode in the Steampunk Transformers Elseworld Hearts of Steel is a bat-winged fantasia of a biplane, based on designs by Gadgeteer Genius Tobias Muldoon.
  • Valérian:
    • "World Without Stars" has pseudo-Renaissance blimps pulled by teams of horse-sized insects.
    • The airships we see at the end could also qualify, since they're basically modified old-school balloons.

    Films — Animated 
By creator:
  • Hayao Miyazaki's entire filmography: scenic flying sequences are a signature element, and he grew up around old airplanes in the factory operated by his father and uncle. See the Anime & Manga folder above for non-cinematic examples.
    • The Castle of Cagliostro adds a classic autogyro as a Chekhov's Gun.
    • Castle in the Sky might as well be considered flying machine porn.
    • Kiki's Delivery Service has a pedal powered experimental plane and extensive broomstick flight scenes. There's also the H. P. 42 biplane airliner in the opening credits.
    • Porco Rosso is a love letter to early aviation, using some of the most fanciful designs from real aviation to ever actually work.
    • The steam-powered, wing-flapping aircraft of Howl's Moving Castle are beautiful examples, including both giant warplanes and small commuter craft. Eventually, the castle itself becomes an example.
    • Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro, and Spirited Away are exceptions, but tend to feature flying scenes anyway, via high-jumping, running on cliffs, dragon-riding, or treetop cat-bus rides.
    • The Wind Rises goes even further and is an honest-to-God (if a bit fictionalized) biography of a real-life Japanese aircraft engineer Jiro Horikoshi, a one-time chief designer of Mitsubishi Aircraft, of which the Miyazaki brothers' factory was a subcontractor.
By work:
  • Doraemon: Nobita and the Winged Braves has the Snow Goose, a flying bicycle with wings created by Gusuke the Acrophobic Bird as transport who looks like something out of Da Vinci's design logs. There are several minor characters who pilots similar air-cycles as well, all of them being flightless birds like penguins and kiwis.
  • The airplane (later converted into a helicopter) in Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa. By Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted, it has been fitted with a warp drive... but still powered by monkeys.
  • In Once Upon a Forest, a trio of young Woodland Creatures take their professor's plans for a flying machine called "The Flapper Wingamathing" with them on a quest to retrieve a plant that will help their comatose friend and are able to build a scale replica of the contraption using Bamboo Technology to get the plant from a steep cliff face.
  • Lawrence III's 'hovercraft' in Pokémon 2000, which despite being composed of massive structural girders and massive expensively decorated rooms is held aloft by slowly rotating propellers above and below the tips of the structural girders. Contrast this with its aversion in the helicopter Dr.Oak and co. arrive in, which would be pretty bog standard for Real Life.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • The Mummy Returns has a strange example. The film itself takes place in 1922, but the eccentric Izzy, the pilot whom Rick hires to transport his group to Egypt, turns out to be piloting a large dirigible, claiming that "airplanes are a thing in the past" much to Rick's dismay.
  • In Sky Bandits, Fritz constructs strange flying machines he calls 'specials' out of the remains of crashed planes and machinery he finds lying around. After most of their planes are bombed, Major Bannock's squadron press the 'specials' into service. Many of them look like they should not be able to fly at all.
  • Slipstream (1989) takes place in an After the End future where most travel is by flying the titular slipstream (a ground-level jetstream). The protagonist dreams of founding a balloon factory, and at the end we're treated to a montage of colourful and strangely shaped balloons, implying that he got his wish.
  • Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, or How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 Hours 11 Minutes (the Trope Namer, as you might guess) opens with a brief "history of flight", featuring plenty of improbable and amusing contraptions. The opening credits feature a flotilla of humorous animated examples. The racing airplanes in the movie itself are also examples, and, notably, are all fairly faithful reproductions of actual early aircraft. The "History of Flight" sequence was apparently a compilation that somebody had put together back in the 1920s, saving the movie's producers the job of making it themselves outside of the Red Skelton comedy bits.

    Literature 
  • Airman features an Alternate History of the development of heavier-than-air aircraft in the late 19th century. The protagonist, Conor Broekhart, uses a self-invented collapsible glider to get to and from the island prison slash diamond mine Little Saltee to pick up a cache of diamonds he stashed there while he was a prisoner. In the climax of the story, he uses a self-invented first-of-its-kind heavier-than-air flying machine to reach the Castle on Great Saltee and save his parents and love-interest. Unfortunately, the flying machine is destroyed in the attempt.
  • The jet-propelled ornithopters of the Dune universe probably count, though they are an unusually high-tech example.
  • In The Familiar of Zero, there are ships with wings. How they fly? Wizards did itliterally.
  • Ornithopters are used by the Empire of Granbretan in The History of the Runestaff. They're small, lightly armed, and not always wholly reliable, but in a world where the next best way to fly is on the back of a giant flamingo they're still an important part of the Granbretan war machine.
  • The Mortal Engines series features lots of airships of all imaginable shapes and sizes (from couch-sized airships perfect for indoor flight to massive Air Dreadnoughts, and lots of assorted tramp traders in-between), perfect for adventuring in a vast Steampunk and Dieselpunk world. In the early books, the secrets of heavier-than-air flight have been lost, but later in the series we see all sorts of armed ornithopters, autogyros, and rickety biplanes competing with zeppelins in the sky. Air travel is heavily romanticized in the setting — air traders ply the "Bird Roads," seeing the world and having lots of glamorous and dangerous adventures.
  • Peter and the Starcatchers: Wendy Darling's uncle in Peter and the Sword of Mercy has built an ornithopter that's in its early testing stages. By the second time we see it being tested, it's fully functional, even before Wendy dumps her supply of starstuff into the fuel tank to extend its range.
  • Robur the Conqueror, on which the film Master of the World was largely based (and not so much on the same author's book Master of the World), features the "aeronef" Albatross. It's powered by electricity, uses lots of airscrews for both lift and propulsion, and is made of highly compressed paper.
  • In Seekers of the Sky, the deficit of iron in the world has drastically slowed down the scientific progress. As such, flying is still in its infancy. All flying machines are gliders made up mostly of wood and sheets. They do have engines, which can be started with either a chemical or an electrical lighter. Also, gliders can be outfitted with one-time booster rockets that drop off after their fuel is expended. Most of the time, gliders are only used to deliver messages, as flying them is extremely dangerous, preventing them from taking on passengers. All pilots must memorize wind maps, as no instruments are present in gliders. Chinese gliders are the most advanced, and their boosters allow them to cross entire continents in one go. Due to their fragile nature, Old School Dogfighting is impossible. In wartime, gliders may be used to drop bombs.
  • Clockpunk ornithopters and helicopters (along with airships) used to dominate the skies in Shadows of the Apt, but they're rapidly being outcompeted by WWII-esque planes in more recent books.
  • The original Tom Swift series of books has Tom designing a succession of improbable, and sometimes magnificent, flying machines, starting with his combination dirigible/winged airship, Red Cloud.
  • In Updraft, use of hang-glider-esque wings to fly around and between the towers of the city is routine, and Kirit is very keen to pass her tests and become an airborne trader like her mother. These wings are also used for combat, both against monsters and in duels (including Trial by Combat). There do not seem to be any larger air vehicles, however; or powered ones.

    Live-Action TV 
  • The Goodies sometimes make their "trandem" bicycle fly, albeit precariously, by attaching it to a balloon. In their own "great race" episode, Graham manages to save their lives when their car going over a cliff by having it deploy wings.
  • A Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch has an inventor wearing a flying machine that consisted of two small wings on his back, powered by a hand crank on his chest. It turns out (in a brilliant visual gag) not to work particularly well. Some of these also showed up in Terry Gillam's animated linking sequences.

    Tabletop Games 
By creator:
  • Games Workshop:
    • Warhammer 40,000: The metallic Deffkopta model. The plastic models, however, are more subdued, just looking like a bike modded into a helicopter. This works because it is made by Orks; they're idiots with telekinetic powers, so if they believe something will work, it does.
    • In Warhammer Fantasy, the Dwarfs have steam-powered "Gyrocopters", while the Dogs of War have the Birdmen of Catrazza, canvas-winged humans using da Vinci-esque pedal-powered flight suits. The Birdmen's regimental motto is outright "Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines".
    • Warhammer: Age of Sigmar goes big with these, adding an entire faction of dwarves riding these and living in giant, flying cities. Even the most basic of armies is mostly composed of heavily armed airships.
By work:
  • The VSF miniatures game Aeronef by Wessex Games is set in an alternate universe where powered dirigible airships, nicknamed "'digs", are invented in 1852, and a powered anti-gravity system is developed in 1884, resulting in the construction of the titular Aeronefs, often shortened to "'nefs". Later developments include the discovery of negative-gravity particles that are passively generated from "R-Matter", a substance found in meteorites, usually in rainforests or polar regions. 'Nefs and 'Digs come in a variety of types, mostly military, ranging from small Patrol 'Nef to Battleships, as well as Carriers and specialist bombers. The style of miniatures is heavily inspired by the pre-dreadnought era from the mid-1870s to around the early 1910s, combining ship-like designs with aerial features such as control surfaces and more "conventional" gas-bag dirigible airships, albeit with a bit More Dakka.
  • Deadlands, set in the 19th century with mad science, naturally uses this aesthetic for all of its aircraft.
  • In Flying Circus, many of the flyable planes abide by the laws of physics. Yet, the setting's fantastical and magical nature means that much of the aircraft in Flying Circus is unrealistically magnificent. Most notably are the Leviathan machines, magical autonomous war machines in the vein of the title-granting machines of Howl's Moving Castle or Castle in the Sky.
  • GURPS: Whenever the generic line tackles more or less Steampunk themes, it naturally tends to involve the odd eccentric flying contraption. For example:
    • In the steampunk Roman Empire that dominates the Roma Aeterna timeline in GURPS Alternate Earths, the only native heavier-than-air flyer is the jactavolans, an incredibly dangerous melding of Roman glider and Chinese rocket technology used for scouting and courier purposes. In game terms, you have to roll Piloting checks on takeoff (to see if the rockets explode) and landing (to see if you crash). All jactavolans pilots are state-owned slaves who receive both their freedom and Roman citizenship if they survive a five-year term of service.
    • The original GURPS Steampunk supplement featured a few instances, statted out for the Third Edition of the game. They were re-statted for the Fourth Edition in GURPS Vehicles: Steampunk Conveyances. The assumption is that such things will often be appropriate features for steampunk settings.
    • GURPS Vehicles: Transports of Fantasy also has game details for a few flying machines that demonstrate the trope, not least the Gnomish Aircar and the Dwarven Steam Airship.
  • Rocket Age: The H'Slit tribes of Venus make sail-ships, gliders and sail-planes out of wood, bone and incredibly carved stone fittings. The largest are capable of up to a dozen Venusians. It is likely these contraptions only fly due to the immense heat rising from Venus's depths.
  • Space 1889: Played with. Liftwood ships do not have wings, balloons or more than one propeller. They look and to a large extent function like ships (though the tie-in novel A Prince of Mars by Frank Chadwick describes the liftwood ships as less similar to regular ships than the role-playing game). Even the early attempts at flight that historically looked like this are unlikely to occur in Space 1889 since liftwood has allowed practical flying ships. In the core book, however, there is a list of inventions that the player characters can make including flying machines. Many of them have illustrations that looks a lot like this.
  • World Tree (RPG): By necessity, travel between branches of the World Tree involves crossing enormous gulfs of empty air for anyone who doesn't fancy walking the long way around to the trunk and back up the other branch, and skyborne vessels are consequently common and, as they're all explicitly magical in nature, very elaborate and strange. Airborne ships, chariots pulled by birds and giant kites are among the more common of these contraptions.

    Video Games 
  • Because the game doesn't limit on what shape you can make your airships in Airships: Conquer the Skies, it usually results in this trope. Usually, the basic design of airship with bare bone essentials are big wooden boxes, lifted to the sky only by the power of suspendium.
  • Assassin's Creed:
    • One of Leonardo da Vinci's flying machines appears in Assassin's Creed II, propelled by giant pyres burning all over the city.
    • Modified into a dive-bomber variant in Brotherhood. The firebombs actually set fire to the ground, which means you can finally provide your own means of lift.
  • BioShock Infinite has the floating city of Columbia. Powered by hard (if somewhat questionable) science, and with a delightful early-1900s style, it is truly a marvelous, magnificent flying city.
  • Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons has a scene in which the brothers need to ride a hang-glider that can be controlled by moving around and shifting weight to tilt the machine.
  • Discworld Noir has Leonard of Quirm's Flapping-Wing-Flying-Device (pedal-powered ornithopter). A model briefly appears in Men at Arms, but in the game, he's built a full-size version, which Lewton flies in the final battle with Nylonathotep.
  • Several Final Fantasy games (most notably Final Fantasy VI and Final Fantasy IX) take place in worlds where the local civilization is just beginning to conquer skies, so the local Global Airship is usually built in this aesthetic. Final Fantasy XII, in particular, features a world where commercial air travel is commonplace; it's definitely a luxury, but not so much of one that regular tourists and pilgrims can't afford it. Massive military fleets with giant cruisers and one-pilot fighters are also standard — and yet, having your personal airship is still a great symbol of freedom, accomplishment, and adventure, and Sky Pirates are idolized as rogue heroes and even role models for achieving this freedom, rather than regarded as dangerous criminals.
  • In Gigantic, each team of heroes arrive on the battlefield aboard a winged airship and re-spawn there if they die in combat.
  • Guns of Icarus and its MMO sequel Guns of Icarus Online have you participating in combat between different kinds of fanciful airships in a Steampunk setting.
  • Heidelberg 1693 has a steampunk gyrocopter called a Schwübelflüg ("wings" in German), lifted by a hot-air balloon with paper wings which you commandeer to fly over the burning, zombie-infested city to reach the Moon King's palace. It even has a projectile launcher for taking care of pesky flying zombies.
  • The flyers in Jade Empire, rocket-propelled Magitek-powered cloth-winged constructions designed and built by a mad god named Kang. They really ought to shred themselves rather than actually flying.
  • Corki the Daring Bombadier from League of Legends flies around the battlefield in a heavily armed Magitek gyrocopter.
  • Beedle's shop in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword has a square wooden helicopter in a world that otherwise doesn't have powered flight. It's powered by pedaling and has some sort of primitive computer.
  • Lighthouse: The Dark Being features two ornithopters in the parallel world. One of them is shaped like a bat, and it can be remotely summoned when playing an electronic pan pipe at its highest frequency.
  • Obsidian has its own moth-like Ornithopter. Don't even question how it flies in this case; 80% of the game is inside dream worlds. It's powered by a Zoetrope!
  • The Prop Cycle is a flying bicycle that the player controls using a real bike in the arcade cabinet.
  • The Vinci faction from Rise of Legends are all steampunk-ish, and so are their flying machines. Specifically, the flying machines come from the Pirata city-state, and some feature equipment like grappling hooks clearly meant for boarding.
  • Shovel Knight:
    • Propeller Knight commands an airship that is kept aloft by two gigantic propellers and propels itself through the sky by means of giant oars.
    • There's another, smaller airship docked above one of villages which, from the outside, appears to be a blimp, but you can climb up inside what should be the part where the lighter-than-air gas is contained and find a blacksmith's forge in there, calling into question what exactly is keeping the ship in the air, since no mention is made of it being magical.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog:
    • Those Babylon Rogues certainly have a nice airship.
    • The Egg Albatross in Sonic Heroes was designed in this general style, resembling a dirigible with a propeller on the back of its envelope, another on its front, and oversize wings attached to its gondola with jet turbines at their tips. Of course, this being Dr. Eggman's technology, it's much more advanced than it appears and likely has its Steampunk look for solely aesthetic reasons.
  • Spore allows you to build your own not only as airships, but also as spaceships! That's right, you can really let your Steampunk ideas go loose in this.
  • The Barnstormer from Total Annihilation: Kingdoms, which resembles a three-way cross between the Wright Flyer, a helicopter, and a bat.
  • Warcraft:
    • In Warcraft III, engineers can craft a Flying Machine (actually called that) that fits this trope perfectly, with two distinct variations: one has a fairly typical-looking helicopter rotor with a pair of propellers for forward thrust, while the other has a pair of propeller-turbine contraptions that can rotate to point forward or downward, a bit like an Osprey VTOL aircraft. Both are made with the finest steampunk materials, of course.
    • The Flying Machine returns in World of Warcraft, this time looking like an old plane with tiny wings and a helicopter-like propeller on the top, belches smoke, and seems to barely stay airborne. If you idle in air with it, its engine will occasionally turn off for a second or so, causing it to fall a few feet before it turns back on. As the story progresses, so does technology, to the point that both the Alliance and Horde have small fleets of airships, while the Gnomes and Goblins who lead the way are moving on to rocketry and airplanes.

    Visual Novels 
  • In Code:Realize, Impey Barbicane successfully builds a steam-powered ornithopter. It looks like a mechanical mosquito with too many wings and, despite the fact that it seems like there should be no possible way it would ever get off the ground, manages to fly fast and high when needed and can also hover in place.

    Web Animation 

    Webcomics 
  • A Beginner's Guide to the End of the Universe: The Commonwealth's air fleet consists of hot air balloons and armed zeppelins, while the Followers of the Icosahedron use a mix of these, war planes — some resembling jet liners with guns and some bricks with wings and propellers — and flying monsters. The Everyman later upgrades one of the Commonwealth's zeppelins by fusing it with a muscle car, which results in the airship gaining a large external engine on its envelope and becoming able to zip around at very high speeds.

    Web Original 
  • The Clockwork Raven is all about this. In addition to the title machine, a canvas-winged ornithopter that mostly works as a glider, the characters like to watch flying machines on an island far below their Floating Continent home. They see examples of almost every one of this trope's rules.

    Western Animation 
  • Albert the Fifth Musketeer sometimes makes use of a human-powered ornithopter. In the contraption's debut episode, it doesn't allow a Crew of One (or at least, not when the pilot is too short to reach the pedals), so he has to ask the Queen to help him pilot it to rescue the rest of his team.
  • The various steampunk-ish aircraft seen in Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra are generally pretty plausible, but Asami's airship is as magnificent as it is impossible. It looks like the offspring of a blimp and a skyscraper, being mostly made of glass and metal and featuring an excessively huge and lavishly decorated bridge. Eight comparatively small propellers attached to the back half of the ship (via huge and ornate metal frames) supposedly keep the monster airborne.
  • The aeroplanes on Dastardly & Muttley in Their Flying Machines, mainly the ones Klunk concocts, look like they defy aeronautical physics, but through Rule of Funny, they do fly. Keeping them flying is another matter as Dick Dastardly's Vulture Squadron are hopelessly inept.
  • The two-part Dinosaur Train special "Dinosaur Train: Zeppelin Adventure" features the latest innovation from Dinosaur Train Industries: a zeppelin. It doesn't seem to travel through time, but it can the characters places that the train and the submarine can't. It comes complete with its own catchy theme tune.
  • The Flintstone Flyer in the first episode of The Flintstones, a pedal-operated whirlygig invented by Barney (despite the name). Later in the series, planes were just modern airliners with pterodactyls instead of jets, or else one giant pterodactyl with a cabin mounted on top.
  • Futurama, despite being set in the 31st century, occasionally shows flying machines that fit this trope right alongside Flying Cars and Shiny-Looking Spaceships. Bender once refers to the protagonists' Cool Starship as "the Flying Machine", evoking this trope (though their ship is not itself an example). Leonardo's spaceship in "The Duh-Vinci Code" is probably an example, though, and there are more on the planet Vinci.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
    • In "Griffon the Brush-Off", Pinkie Pie tries at one point to keep up with Rainbow Dash and Gilda in a pedal-powered helicopter decorated with candy-cane stripes which Dash accurately describes as a "crazy contraption".
    • Tank the tortoise gets outfitted with a Magitek propeller in "May The Best Pet Win!", and he can be seen flying with it in a number of other episodes.
    • In "Sweet and Elite", Rarity christens an airship, which is made up of a conventional-looking boat suspended from a fish-shaped balloon (and appears to be driven by fish-like fins in place of a propeller).
    • In "Apple Family Reunion", three members of the extended Apple family arrive in an airship with a gondola that looks like it was made from a rowboat and a propeller.
    • In "Testing Testing 1, 2, 3", Twilight narrowly avoids hitting a panicked Cherry Berry flying another pedal-powered helicopter, though that one has a canopy which more or less resembles that of a Real Life helicopter.
  • Scooby-Doo:
  • The Simpsons:
  • The Disney Wartime Cartoon Victory Through Air Power starts off with a humorous review of the progress of the airplane from the machines of the early days of aviation to the deadly warplanes of World War II.

    Other / Real Life 
  • Honourable mention must go to the Wright brothers, who created the first successful heavier-than-air flying machine. It stayed airborne for all of twelve seconds... but look at what it started!
    • While their twelve-second flight is the most famous, they actually made four flights that day, with the longest lasting a full 59 seconds.
    • Though the Wright Brothers are generally accepted as the inventors of heavier-than-air flight, the title has historically been contested by Samuel Pierpont Langley, Alberto Santos-Dumont, Gustave Whitehead, and others. Please see this trope's Analysis page for more.
    • One thing that indisputably puts the Wright brothers in a place in history is that they were eventually able to refine their concept into the world's first practical heavier-than-air-craft. The Wright Flyer III achieved nearly forty minutes of flight on its first test, enough for it to be indisputably useful in a reconnaissance role.
  • Leonardo da Vinci dreamed up a whole range of Magnificent Flying Machines, including human-powered ornithopters and corkscrew helicopters.
  • Red Bull Flügtag showcases some hilarious, inefficient, ineffective but ultimately awesome "flying" machines.
  • This clip presents black-and-white stock footage that includes several silly airplanes and helicopters failing (two examples at the beginning, then more about halfway through).
  • A working, human-powered ornithopter was built by University of Toronto post-graduate students and flown successfully in August 2010 (though earlier flights can contest the "world's first" claim in the article, this is likely the most successful, and elaborate, design used so far). Interestingly, the design was created using Leonardo da Vinci's sketches as an early starting point, though the final product looks nothing like his work (but no less impressive in flight for that).
  • An annual festival in Japannote  brings together man-powered contraptions to essentially leap off a cliff together in their pursuit of flight. Success is measured in distance and seconds, but isn't the sole criteria; points are given for design originality and sheer ballsy-ness.
  • A series of 3-dimensional models in the Chinook Mall (Calgary, Alberta, Canada) are this. They're suspended from a track which they periodically move around. Only one is an actual airplane.
  • The ideas of Francesco Lana de Terzi, an Italian Jesuitic priest of the XVII century deserve mention here. He envisioned what basically was a flying boat, where lift would be given by copper spheres with no air insidenote .
  • As mentioned above, various aircraft designs of World War I embodied this aesthetic, partially because at the time the great powers of the world needed absolutely anything that could vaguely fly that they could get their hands on in order to wrest a potential advantage from the skies, floating alongside observation balloons and Zeppelins. Among the more fanciful designs were the Entrich Taube, the very first bomber in the world whose wings physically bended and twisted in order to steer, the British "pusher" fighters such as F.E.2 and Airco DH 2, the BE9 who attempted to circumvent the issue of early fighters potentially shooting through their propeller by placing the gunner in front of it in a wooden box (this was prior to the invention of the synchronization gear), and the Fokker A.I, a reconnaissance monoplane whose wings were controlled by a system of external cables mounted on a mast-like structure.
  • Played straight in German and Finnish languages, where the word for "aeroplane" - Flugzeug and lentokone - mean directly translated as "flight machine".


Alternative Title(s): Flying Machine, Magnificent Flying Machines

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