The opening chapter of Wings of War — From Zeppelin to Sixth Generation, our series on how military aviation was invented, one breakthrough at a time.

It is the first of November, 1911, and a young Italian lieutenant named Giulio Gavotti is flying a flimsy Etrich Taube monoplane over the desert near Tripoli, in Libya. Balanced on his knees is a small leather pouch. Inside it are four grenades, each about the size of a grapefruit and weighing roughly four pounds.

At about 600 feet over the oasis of Ain Zara, Gavotti takes the controls between his knees, reaches into the pouch, screws a detonator into the first grenade by hand, and simply drops it over the side. Then the second. Then the third and the fourth, onto a Turkish camp below. There is no bombsight, no bomb rack, no real aiming — just a man in a wood-and-fabric aeroplane throwing explosives out of the cockpit with his bare hands.

It is the first time in history that bombs have been dropped on an enemy from an aircraft. The whole future of air war — the Blitz, Hiroshima, the cruise missile, the armed drone — is sitting in that little leather pouch. And almost no one notices.

A little over a century later, the descendants of Gavotti’s grapefruit grenades are stealth jets that can cross a continent unseen and place a weapon through a specific window. This is the story of how we got from one to the other — and it is, again and again, the same story: a new idea, invented at almost the same moment by rival nations, and won not by whoever thought of it first, but by whoever could build and use it at scale.

Era 1 — Birth (1900s–1918): the first jobs in the sky

When the First World War began in 1914, the aeroplane was barely a decade old and most generals saw it as a toy. Its first military value was not fighting at all — it was seeing.

Reconnaissance was the original job. Spindly two-seaters droned over the trenches, their observers sketching and photographing enemy positions. In the war’s opening weeks, Allied airmen spotted German armies wheeling east of Paris — intelligence that helped save the city at the Battle of the Marne. The general who had dismissed the aeroplane suddenly could not do without it.

Bombing came astonishingly early — earlier, in fact, than the fighter. As far back as 1911, before the World War had even begun, the Italian lieutenant Giulio Gavotti leaned out of a Taube like the one above and dropped the first bombs in history by hand. Through the early years of the war, crews simply carried small bombs and grenades aloft and lobbed them over the side. It was wildly inaccurate — but the idea of attack from above was already loose in the world.

The fighter was the last of the three roles to appear, and it came precisely to stop the other two. If aeroplanes could see and could bomb, each side urgently needed a way to shoot down the enemy’s. The breakthrough, around 1915, was a mechanism to fire a machine gun straight through the spinning propeller without shredding it — credit genuinely contested between a German patent, a French design and the famous Fokker production version. Once Germany fielded it, the “Fokker Scourge” gave the Central Powers a deadly edge, and the dogfight was born.

From there the bomber grew up fast. Hand-thrown grenades gave way to purpose-built machines — the twin-engined Gotha and the four-engined “Giant” — that could cross the sea and strike cities. The first effective campaign of strategic bombing fell on Folkestone in May 1917, a story we tell in full in the first deep-dive of this series.

Era 2 — The hard lessons (1919–1945): radar, the carrier, the jet

Between the wars the biplane gave way to the sleek, all-metal monoplane, and theorists like Italy’s Giulio Douhet argued that fleets of bombers could win wars on their own by flattening cities. When the Second World War came, those ideas were tested to destruction.

The Battle of Britain in 1940 was decided not just by Spitfires and Hurricanes but by something invisible: radar. Britain’s Chain Home network could detect raiders far out to sea and vector fighters to meet them — the first time a nation fought an air battle with a real-time picture of the sky. Germany had radar too; Britain simply integrated it better.

At sea, the aircraft carrier dethroned the battleship: at Taranto, Pearl Harbor and Midway, aircraft launched from ships decided the fate of fleets. And strategic bombing arrived in horrifying maturity, as thousand-bomber streams of Lancasters, B-17s and B-29s burned the cities of Germany and Japan — the logic of Folkestone, scaled up a thousandfold.

Then, in the war’s final years, came two revolutions that would define everything after. In Britain, Frank Whittle, and in Germany, Hans von Ohain, had each independently invented the jet engine; Germany fielded the first operational jet fighter, the Messerschmitt Me 262, in 1944. And from German test ranges rose the first cruise and ballistic missiles, the V-1 and V-2 — the ancestors of every guided weapon and space rocket to come.

Era 3 — The Cold War (1945–1991): faster, higher, deadlier

The jet engine and the atomic bomb fused into a single, terrifying idea: the nuclear-armed bomber that could erase a city in an afternoon. For decades the world’s survival rested on a “triad” of bombers, land-based missiles and submarines — and on the aircraft built to deliver, deter and spy.

Fighters broke the sound barrier and kept climbing. Over Korea, American F-86 Sabres dueled Soviet-built MiG-15s in the world’s first large-scale jet combat. The contest became a relentless ladder of speed and altitude, culminating in machines like the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird — a reconnaissance aircraft so fast and so high that no missile ever caught it.

But the most important Cold War aircraft of all may have had no pilot and no wings. In 1960, after the U-2 spy plane was shot down over the USSR, America’s first reconnaissance satellite, Corona, returned its first film capsule — snatched out of the sky over the Pacific by a passing aeroplane. In a single pass it photographed more of the Soviet Union than every U-2 flight combined. The Soviets had their own, Zenit. The highest ground of all had been seized, and it was in orbit.

Era 4 — The information age (1991–2015): the invisible and the precise

On the opening night of the 1991 Gulf War, aircraft that radar could barely see slipped over Baghdad and dropped bombs down ventilation shafts while the city’s defences fired blindly into an empty sky. Two ideas had come of age at once.

The first was stealth. In one of history’s great ironies, the mathematics that made it possible came from a paper by a Soviet physicist that the USSR ignored and American engineers read — producing the faceted F-117 and, later, the B-2 and F-22. The second was precision: laser- and satellite-guided bombs meant that a single aircraft could now do what once took a thousand, and do it without levelling the neighbourhood around the target.

And quietly, a third revolution began on the ground. The drone — pioneered as a reconnaissance tool by Israel and turned into a hunter-killer by the American Predator and Reaper — put the pilot in a trailer thousands of miles from the fight, and changed the moral and political shape of war itself.

Era 5 — Now & next (2015–): the sixth generation

Stealth is no longer an American monopoly. Russia flies the Su-57, and China has not only fielded the J-20 but revealed the tailless, three-engined shapes of what look like true sixth-generation designs — first glimpsed, fittingly, on phone cameras held up by onlookers in Chengdu.

That sixth generation — America’s F-47 and NGAD, Europe’s GCAP and FCAS, China’s new prototypes — is about more than going faster. The defining feature is teaming: a crewed fighter quarterbacking a flock of cheap, autonomous “loyal wingman” drones, with the pilot increasingly a manager of machines rather than a lone gladiator. Space, meanwhile, has become a warfighting domain in its own right, full of the satellites that make everything below them work.

From a man dropping grenades by hand at 600 feet to a pilot commanding a swarm of robots from a stealth cockpit, the throughline has never changed. The side that wins is the side that takes a new idea and industrialises it fastest — and that race is now a three-way contest between NATO, Russia and China.

The pattern beneath it all

Across a century and five eras, the same rhythm repeats. The synchronised gun, the jet engine, radar, stealth — each was invented in two or three places almost simultaneously, because the same problems produce the same answers. The winners were rarely the inventors. They were the ones who turned a clever idea into thousands of aircraft, tied them into a system, and trained the people to use them.

Over the coming weeks, this series will tell each of these stories in full — the airship, the fighter, the bomber, reconnaissance, the satellite, the drone, stealth, the guided missile, electronic warfare and the sixth-generation race — and each will begin, like this one, with the single moment it all turned on. Welcome to Wings of War.

Sources: Imperial War Museum; U.S. National Archives; NASA; National Air and Space Museum; standard aviation histories. Figures and firsts are checked against multiple sources; where credit for an invention is disputed, we say so.