Uiver Collection Mollison was a pioneering Scottish pilot who had flown commercially for Charles Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm's ill-fated Australian National Airways. His wife Amy was Amy Johnson, who in May 1930 had become the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia, flying a de Havilland DH 60 Gipsy Moth "Jason". English aviators Flight Lieutenant Charles Scott and Kenyan coffee plantation manager Captain Tom Campbell Black flew another Comet, a red aircraft, dubbed "Grosvenor House" by the historic hotel's owner. A third de Havilland DH 88 Comet was flown by Cathcart Jones and K. F. Waller, and was the
Claims to the first powered flight Clément Ader's Éole of 1890 was a bat-winged tractor monoplane which achieved a brief, uncontrolled hop, becoming the first heavier-than-air machine in history to take off from level ground under its own power. However his hop is not regarded as true flight because it was neither sustained nor controlled. Ader would later make a false claim of a more extended flight. In 1896, Samuel Pierpont Langley, the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, had successful flights with several unpiloted models, and his "Number 6" model flew more than . From these successes, in 1898 Langley received grants from the War Department