In the late 1890s the Wright brothers noticed a lot of discussion about aircraft and their designs, they found a common flaw with most aircraft concepts at the time and that was controls. There wasn’t a good design out there with a good control scheme for the pilot to steer the aircraft. The brothers both spent years designing and perfecting their wind and control systems before finally flying in 1903
With an aircraft's immense speed combined with the angle of the wings, a lift is created that allows the aircraft to move upward. An increased amount of air pressure beneath the wings is what creates this upward lift.
Aircraft have slowly evolved from propeller based forms of transportation to jet based. All planes until 1939 were propelled by turbines. The first jet was built in Germany and was called the “Heinkel He 178”.
The most common alternative form of flight is the helicopter. While the top rotor of a helicopter functions very similarly to a propeller on an aircraft, the rear rotor is used for an entirely different purpose. The rear rotor is used to stabilize the helicopter and it stops the aircraft from spinning uncontrollably.
In 2018, engineers at MIT created a new type of engine with no moving parts and it's called an ion engine. According to Nasa, "Ion propulsion systems ionize (charge) atoms and then exploit their non-neutral charge to expel them from the spacecraft, creating thrust. Dawn’s gridded ion thrusters achieve this by accelerating xenon, ionized by an electron beam, through a voltage between two charged grids. Other ion thrusters, like Hall-effect thrusters, which use magnetic fields to ionize the propellant, work slightly differently." While ion thrusters are not powerful enough to fly a large airplane today, hopefully in the future this new form of propulsion will be.