The engine arrived in Ulster in the summer of 1910 without its petrol tank. Its owner was not willing to wait. She filled an empty whisky bottle with fuel, borrowed the only tubing in the house, which happened to be her deaf aunt's ear trumpet, and fired the thing up in the dark and the rain. The neighbours, she later reported, thought one of the local mills had blown up.

Her name was Lilian Bland, a sports journalist and press photographer living at Carnmoney, just north of Belfast. The machine bolted behind her seat was the Mayfly, a biplane she had designed and built herself from spruce, ash, bamboo and calico. Within weeks it carried her into the air, making her the first woman to fly an aircraft in Ireland, and the Mayfly the first powered biplane in Ireland.

She is widely credited as the first woman in the world to design, build and fly her own aeroplane. Then her father offered her a car to stop, and she took it.

A postcard, a seagull and a Blackpool air show

Bland was born in Maidstone, Kent, on 28 September 1878, into a family of Anglo-Irish gentry. Around 1900 she and her father moved to Tobercorran House in Carnmoney to live with her widowed aunt, Sarah Smythe. By then Bland was already an unconventional figure: she wore breeches, smoked, rode astride rather than side-saddle, and was an accomplished shot. She earned her living as a sports journalist and press photographer for London newspapers.

It was photography that pointed her at the sky. She spent days on Scottish islands photographing seabirds, watching the gulls ride the wind. Then her uncle Robert sent her a postcard of Louis Blériot's monoplane from Paris, and the idea took hold.

In 1909 she went to the first official aviation meeting in Blackpool, notebook in hand, measuring the machines on display and telling anyone who would listen that she was going to build and fly her own. The reaction, she later wrote, was “hoots and derision”, which did not worry her at all.

Building the Mayfly

Her late uncle, General William James Smythe, had left a well-equipped workshop, and Bland went to work there. First came a model biplane with a six-foot wingspan, which she flew as a kite. Then she scaled up to a full-size glider of spruce, bamboo, ash and American elm, with unbleached calico for the wings. Steering was a bicycle handlebar.

Doubters questioned whether it would ever leave the ground, so she named it the Mayfly, with deliberate irony: it may fly, or it may not. On the slopes of Carnmoney Hill she tested it with the help of four burly members of the Royal Irish Constabulary and a local lad, Joe Blain. When the wind lifted the glider, the four constables let go. Joe hung on. If the Mayfly could lift five men, Bland reasoned, it could carry an engine.

She ordered one from the young firm of A.V. Roe in Manchester, the company that would later build the Avro 504: a 20 hp, air-cooled, two-cylinder two-stroke, at a price of £100. When delivery dragged on, she crossed to England and brought the engine home herself, with an adjustable-pitch propeller, to the astonishment of her fellow passengers.

National Museums NI tells the story of Lilian Bland and the Mayfly for its Museum of Innovation exhibition at the Ulster Transport Museum.

A whisky bottle and an ear trumpet

What happened next is the most famous episode of the whole story, and it comes straight from Bland's own pen. She reported it to Flight magazine, the weekly she had been reading and writing to since it was founded in 1909. Her letter appeared on 16 July 1910.

In the same letter she added that the mechanic, absorbed in the engine, had been pouring petrol over the wing instead of down the ear trumpet, and that the engine “subsided with a sigh”. She also offered some practical advice on dress: mechanic's overalls were best, because skirts were out of the question with all the wires, not to mention the oil.

The engine was beautifully balanced, she wrote, but the vibration was enormous and every nut danced itself loose. Wires snapped. She double-nutted the bolts, strengthened the structure and reworked the undercarriage. Then she needed somewhere bigger than a hillside to fly.

Airborne at Randalstown

Lord O'Neill lent her his parkland at Randalstown, about 800 acres of it. There was one drawback, she told Flight: the park contained a loose bull, “and if it gets annoyed and charges I shall have every inducement to fly!”

Because the engine sat behind the pilot, Joe Blain stood between the tail booms and swung the propeller. The first attempts were short hops. Then the Mayfly flew. Engineers Ireland dates the breakthrough to 31 August 1910; Wikipedia says late August, and some accounts say September. Accounts credit her with climbing to about 30 feet and covering about a quarter of a mile, though sources differ on the details, and many of her flights were far shorter.

So short, in fact, that she was not always sure she had left the ground. She walked back across the wet grass to look for the point where the wheel tracks stopped.

It was a genuine first for Ireland. Harry Ferguson had made the first powered flight in Ireland in December 1909, but no woman had flown there, and the Mayfly became the first powered biplane in Ireland. In December 1910 Flight published her detailed description of the machine with a scale drawing. Her whole outlay, she estimated, was under £200, most of it the engine; the wood cost her only £3 or £4.

Ireland Made, the Irish transport archive, retells how Lilian Bland designed, built and flew the Mayfly in 1910.

The car that ended a flying career

Bland kept flying into early 1911 and tried to turn her work into a business, advertising biplanes at £250 without an engine and gliders at £80. Few buyers came. She also knew the Mayfly's limits: it was underpowered, and a bigger engine would have needed an expensive redesign of the whole airframe.

Her father, alarmed for her safety, made her an offer: give up flying and he would buy her a car, a Model T Ford. Having proved her point, she accepted. The engine was sold and the airframe went to a boys' gliding club.

She threw herself into the car instead. By April 1911 she was running a Ford dealership in Belfast, which Engineers Ireland calls the city's first. On 3 October 1911 she married her cousin Charles Loftus Bland, a lumberjack from British Columbia, and the couple emigrated to Canada to homestead on virgin land on the wild coast of Vancouver Island, where boats were the most practical transport and, by necessity, she learned to keep their engines running.

Canada, Cornwall and a long goodbye

Their only child, Patricia, was born on 13 April 1913. She died of tetanus in 1929, aged 16, and the marriage did not survive the loss. Bland returned to England in 1935, settled in Kent and worked as a gardener, playing the stock market with her wages.

By the 1950s she had retired to a cottage at Sennen, near Land's End in Cornwall, where she painted, gardened and bet on the horses. In 1971, aged 92, she was quoted in the Belfast Telegraph saying the only excitement left to her was gambling. She died on 11 May 1971 and is buried in the churchyard at Sennen.

A 1987 report on Myra Gleeson's research into Ireland's pioneering women aviators, which began when she saw a photograph of Lilian Bland.

Remembering the Mayfly

For decades Bland was a footnote. That has changed. The Ulster History Circle placed a blue plaque at the family home in Carnmoney. On the centenary of her flight, Glengormley Park in Newtownabbey was renamed the Lilian Bland Community Park, its centrepiece a stainless-steel Mayfly. In 2021 National Museums NI featured her in an exhibition on Irish innovators at the Ulster Transport Museum at Cultra.

Her career as an aviator lasted barely a year. Yet in that year a woman with a borrowed workshop, a hillside, four policemen and an ear trumpet did what most of the men at Blackpool only talked about. She designed an aeroplane, built it, and flew it. Then she swapped it for a Ford and went looking for the next adventure.

Sources: Flight (16 July and 17 December 1910, via lilianbland.ie), Engineers Ireland, Women's Museum of Ireland, Scientific American, National Museums NI, Wikipedia (Lilian Bland; Bland Mayfly)