flying machine

plural flying machines

1. archaicEarly term for an aircraft; a machine for flying in (gerund); a machine that flies (participial adjective).

   1 more example

   "Around the World in Eighty Days" once had so much appeal to the imagination that Jules Verne wrote a novel about it. The latest proposal is to girdle the globe in three months in a flying machine. The practicability of such a flight is here discussed by an expert. Mr. Woodhouse is a member of the Aero Club of America and managing editor of "Flying". ¶ When the Aero Club of America received the news that the Panama-Pacific International Exposition had decided to offer $300,000 in prize money for a ninety-day aircraft race around the world, no one connected with aeronautics laughed at the conception or called it the dream of a Verne or a Wells. A map of the course of the race indicates that to circumaviate the globe will mean flights over mountains and deserts, through storms, and across seas. But formidable obstacles in all of these classifications have been surmounted before by airmen, and, of course, can be surmounted again.

   1914 February 28, Henry Woodhouse, “Girdling the Globe by Motor-Driven Aircraft”, in Collier's, volume 52, number 24, page 13