Lilian Bland called her airplane the Mayfly.
The name was a joke with a practical question behind it: It may fly, or it may not.
In 1909, that was not an unreasonable concern. Powered flight was only a few years old, and airplanes were still experimental machines. Bland had no formal training in aeronautical engineering. What she had was curiosity, access to a workshop at her family’s home near Belfast, and the conviction that she could learn enough to build a flying machine herself.
Bland was already a photographer and journalist with an interest in birds and flight. A postcard from her uncle showing Louis Bleriot’s monoplane helped turn that interest toward airplanes. Later that year, she attended an aviation meeting in Blackpool, where she studied the aircraft on display.
Then she went home and started building.
She began small, making a model biplane with a six-foot wingspan. When that worked, she moved on to a full-size glider. The Mayfly grew from ash, spruce, bamboo, American elm, wire, and fabric. Bland bent the ash for the wing tips with steam. She designed the engine bed as a separate chassis and devised a control system operated with a handlebar and foot pedals.
This was not simply an enthusiast assembling someone else’s design. Bland was working through the problems herself, and she later described the Mayfly’s construction in detail for the aviation journal Flight.
The glider worked well enough that she decided to add an engine.
She ordered a 20-horsepower engine from A.V. Roe & Co. in England. When delivery dragged on, Bland went to England and collected it herself, transporting it back to Ireland by rail.
Her fuel tank had not yet arrived, but the engine had.
So she improvised.
For an early engine test, Bland used an empty whiskey bottle to hold the fuel and borrowed her aunt’s ear trumpet as a funnel. In a letter published by Flight in July 1910, she described the resulting noise as “a cat-fight on a very enlarged scale.” The test ended in rain and darkness, with Bland deciding that perhaps she should wait for the proper tank.
There were more problems to solve. The engine’s vibration shook parts loose. The aircraft needed strengthening and adjustment. Bland kept working.
By late August 1910, she took the powered Mayfly to Randalstown in County Antrim. This time, it left the ground.
Bland had designed an airplane, built it, installed its engine, learned its controls, and flown it herself. The Ulster Transport Museum calls her the first woman in the world to design, build, and fly her own airplane; the National Museums NI archive uses the more cautious description “a first for a woman in Ireland and maybe the world.”
Either way, what happened in that field was remarkable enough without embellishment.
Bland briefly advertised airplanes and gliders for sale, but aviation did not become her life’s work. In 1911, she married Charles Bland and later moved with him to Canada.
The Mayfly had answered the question in its name.
It could fly.