ABSTRACT
Although he would not have thought about them in those terms, Ibn Firnas was concerned about those challenges of flight when he built the first flying machine in AD 875. Ibn Firnas watched birds flying and studied their wings carefully. But he failed to notice how birds use their tails when they land; and he ended up crashing his invention into a mountain outside Cordoba, Spain. He told the spectators that he had forgotten to add a tail to his machine, like a bird’s tail.1
