Worldbuilding Weekend Prompt #91 First Flight

Welcome to the next in an ongoing series of writing prompts in the Worldbuilding community !

I'm aiming to post one of these each Sunday. They aren't a replacement for the excellent daily prompts from @worldbuilding they're just an extra opportunity if you have a writing itch you want to scratch. 😀

Image generated by AI in Wombo.art

The prompt this week is - First Flight

Flight is something that is thought to have first happened on Earth around 400 million years ago with the evolution of flying insects. For a long time they had the skies to themselves, but eventually pterosaurs and birds branched off from terrestrial reptiles.

When humans evolved, they spent a long time looking up enviously at species with wings. Throughout history, as far back as ancient Egypt and China, individual inventors attempted to emulate the birds. Descriptions of the results of these early experiments usually included the word "plummet". Finally, man achieved flight, first by balloon with the Montgolfier brothers, and then by aircraft with the Wright brothers.

Tell me a story about flight in your setting ! Is it the realm of dreamers and mad inventors, or is flight a normal part of daily life ? Who made the first flight, and what did they use ? Did they survive ? What did people think about it ?

Just to add a bit of spice to things, the two entries I most like (and are linked in comments to this post, so I can find them !) that are posted by midnight (GMT) next Saturday will each get a prize of one Hive SBI.

This link will take you to the FAQ where you can read more about Hive SBI - it's a project I thoroughly support because it gives both the donor and winner a steady trickle of passive income paid out in the form of upvotes on posts.

Guidelines

I stole these guidelines straight from @worldbuilding prompts (I hope that's okay !), I couldn't have written them any better myself....

• Prompt replies may be anything! Art, game assets, stories, worldbuilding details, fake wiki entries, maps... whatever you want to create!
• Please ensure you reply to this post with a link to your reply
• Posting in or cross-posting to the Worldbuilding community is highly encouraged
• Use the hashtag #worldbuilding
• Prompt replies can be any length.

Some other neat communities for writing that you might want to check out are:

• Freewriters
• Scholar and Scribe
• Tabletop / DND
• The Ink Well

It can be a lot of fun to mix and match our prompts with some of these other community prompts.