Glider

A glider, also called a sailplane, is an unpowered fixed-wing aircraft that climbs and travels by riding naturally occurring currents of rising air rather than an engine, used chiefly in the recreational sport of gliding. Sir George Cayley achieved the first recorded wing-borne hops in a glider around 1849, and Otto Lilienthal advanced the design in the 1890s by building gliders controlled through shifting his own body weight; the Wright brothers replaced weight-shift control with movable control surfaces in the early 1900s before adding an engine to the same airframe lineage in 1903 to achieve powered flight. Restrictions on building motorized aircraft in Germany after the First World War pushed German aviation enthusiasts toward unpowered gliding at sites such as the Wasserkuppe, and by the 1930s the sport had matured into cross-country soaring flights of hundreds of kilometers.