Leonardo da Vinci sketched a glider, an aircraft intended to fly with fixed wings and no powered engine.
Leonardo’s studies of flight included wing shapes, balance, air resistance, and the movements needed to control a machine. Some of his drawings show a pilot positioned face down on a framework, using the body and control surfaces to influence the craft’s attitude. The concept belongs to the broader group of Leonardo’s fixed-wing flight experiments.
A glider differs from an ornithopter because its wings do not flap to provide propulsion. It also differs from a parachute, whose primary purpose is to slow descent rather than provide sustained, controlled flight. Leonardo’s surviving drawings combine observation of birds with mechanical engineering, but they do not establish that he built a working glider.
Powered aircraft appeared centuries later. The Wright brothers made controlled powered flights in 1903, while earlier pioneers including Otto Lilienthal conducted systematic gliding experiments in the nineteenth century. Leonardo’s sketches are historically important because they treated flight as an engineering problem involving measurable forces and controllable structures.