In 1853, he built a larger glider and sent his coachman flying 900 feet across a Brompton dale. Some say it was his grandson and not the coachman who took flight. Still others insist it was neither, but the butler instead.
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It’s the same old story… the butler did it.
DaVinci designed a helicopter and a parachute.
Well now, it was actually another Englishman (Saxon) who first flew before the Battle of Hastings. He did not, however, leave any drawings of his aircraft!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eilmer_of_Malmesbury (Æthelmær Derived from the Old English elements æðele "noble" and mære "famous".) was an 11th-century English Benedictine monk best known for his early attempt at a gliding flight using wings.
"Since it is known that Eilmer was an "old man" in 1066, and that he had made the flight attempt "in his youth", the event is placed some time during the early 11th century, perhaps in its first decade."
Snip... From William of Malsburys history.....
"He was a man learned for those times, of ripe old age, and in his early youth had hazarded a deed of remarkable boldness. He had by some means, I scarcely know what, fastened wings to his hands and feet so that, mistaking fable for truth, he might fly like Daedalus, and, collecting the breeze upon the summit of a tower, flew for more than a furlong [201 metres]. But agitated by the violence of the wind and the swirling of air, as well as by the awareness of his rash attempt, he fell, broke both his legs and was lame ever after. He used to relate as the cause of his failure, his forgetting to provide himself a tail."
More at link.
A famous pioneer aviator, the late Otto Lilienthal of pre-Wright brothers time, would often say, ‘To design a flying machine is nothing; to build it is something; to test it is everything’.
NO IT DOESN'T.
The Wrights created the first successful powered, human-piloted, heavier-than-air craft. Someone else already had beat them to the punch on powered, human-piloted lighter-than-air craft, powered un-piloted heavier-than-air craft, and unpowered, human-piloted heavier-than-air craft.
But the king mac daddy, the first true "aircraft" (carrying a human passenger), was the Montgolfier brothers' hot air balloon in 1783.