Updated by: July 30, 2026
100 Years of Flight
On December 17, 1903, Orville Wright lay flat on the wing of a wooden glider with an engine bolted to it, on a windswept beach in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The flight lasted 12 seconds. He covered 120 feet, shorter than the wingspan of a modern A380.
That’s the whole story of powered human flight, at its beginning. Twelve seconds. A field. A brother filming with a box camera, half expecting it to fail like everything before it had.
A hundred and twenty-three years later, you can leave Melbourne after breakfast and be standing in Rome by the following evening. Round the world in under 24 hours if you route it right. Somewhere in the last century, the sky stopped being the edge of what was possible and became something closer to a commute.
Qantas is chasing the next version of that leap. Project Sunrise, its nonstop Sydney to London service, is set to start flying passengers in October 2027, cutting out the last stop on a route that used to take four days and seven landings back in 1947. The flight will run 20 to 22 hours, longer in the air than the entire distance the Wright brothers covered in their first year of trying. But it removes the layover entirely. Australia to Europe, one sitting, no connection.
Boom Supersonic wants to shrink the clock the other way. Its Overture jet is aiming to cut a New York to London flight roughly in half, cruising near Mach 1.7 with no audible boom reaching the ground below. It’s still years from carrying paying passengers, still working through engine testing and certification and the regulatory fight over flying fast above land. But the direction is clear: after decades of speed standing still since Concorde was retired, someone is trying to make the sky fast again.
And then there’s the leap past the sky altogether. Elon Musk’s Starship is built with Mars as the explicit destination, a vehicle designed from the outset to carry people somewhere no commercial flight has ever gone. It’s unproven at the scale required, and nobody serious is booking a seat yet. But the ambition sits in the same lineage as everything above it. Kitty Hawk to Sydney-London nonstop to Mars is one continuous argument: that distance is a problem to be solved, not a fact to be accepted.
A hundred years ago, flying itself was the miracle. Fifty years ago, jet travel made continents into afternoons. Now the frontier isn’t whether we can fly somewhere, it’s how fast, how far, and how much further out the somewhere can be.
I don’t know what flight looks like in a thousand years. I’m not sure anyone in 1903, watching a plane wobble twelve feet off a beach, could have pictured Sydney to London without a single stop, let alone a rocket aimed at another planet. That’s probably the honest lesson in all of it. We are extremely bad at guessing our own ceiling. Every generation assumes it has found the edge of what’s possible, and every generation after it proves that wrong.
Paul Mercuri
Wake Up Here Founder
