The 100 year anniversary of the first manned aircraft flight on Japanese soil back on December 9th 1909 was celebrated at Yasuda Auditorium at the University of Tokyo, Japan, on December 9th, 2009.
This project was founded by Prof. Shinji Suzuki of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics of The University of Tokyo. Franco-Japanese collaboration on the glider “Le Prieur No. 2″ celebrated it’s 100 years anniversary on December 9th 2009.
Within this project, student’s of the University of Tokyo and Dassault Systemes Japan K.K. brought the glider and the environment around Ueno Koen alive by creating a realtime 3d animation. This 3d evironment toghether with a 1/10 scale model of the glider was presented at the 100 year anniversary ceremony involving the French Embassy in Japan at Yasuda Autditorium on Hongo camous of the University of Tokyo.
History:
“The first human flight in Japan was made on 5 December 1909 in a glider. The machine was invented by Yves Paul Gaston Le Prieur, an attaché of the French Embassy in Tokyo, and Lt. Shirou Aibara of the Japanese Navy. A boy flew onboard their biplane with a box-type tail. The plane was 6.8 meters long and 7.2 meters wide and had 4-wheel landing gear. (The glider to be build is based on the final 7.2 m long glider version (version 4)) It flew 15 meters at a height of four meters on 5 December 1909 after a ground run by the power of several people. Five days later, Le Prieur took off with a ground run pulled by an automobile and flew about 100 meters.” cited from here.
The scale model was based on photographs of the original glider and drawings created by Mr. Richard Ansell. With at scale of 1/10, the model has a length of 720mm and a span of 700 mm . A pilot figure of about 17 cm height representing a real pilot of 170 mm height was created from a wooden figure.