During the Russo-Japanese War, the Imperial Japanese Army uses two Japanese-designed kite balloons during the Siege of Port Arthur (which begins on 1 August); they make 14 successful flights. It is Japan's first combat use of military aviation of any kind.[3][4]
The Royal Swedish Navy commissions Ballondepotfartyg Nr 1 ("Balloon Depot Ship No. 1"), a barge designed to operate one kite balloon. She is the first watercraft designed and built specifically for aeronautical purposes.[6]
3 April – Gabriel Voisin successfully flies a modified Archdeacon glider at Berck sur Mer, Picardy.[9] Voisin added a canard to the design. His longest flight on this day is 25 seconds.
23 April – Thomas Scott Baldwin makes a flight with August Greth's dirigible The California Eagle at San Francisco. This flight predated his efforts with the California Arrow.
April–May – John J. Montgomery and Thomas Scott Baldwin work together at Santa Clara College in California using a wind tunnel to refine propeller designs for dirigibles. These propeller designs were used on Baldwin's successful California Arrow later in 1904 and the wind tunnel was the first of its kind on the west coast of America.
9–11 May – The Imperial Russian Navy armored cruiserRossia carries a balloon on a raiding cruise against Japanese ships into the Sea of Japan in the first use by a warship of a balloon on the high seas in wartime. The balloon makes 13 successful ascents before it breaks its mooring lines and is damaged after landing on the sea.[5]
23 May – The Wright brothers make their first flight attempt in the Wright Flyer II. They are not successful.[10]
25 May – In Tandil, Argentina, Guido Dinelli flies his "Aeroplano apparatus" glider attached to a bicycle for 180 metres (590 ft).[11][12][unreliable source?]
26 May – The Wright brothers make their first successful flight in the Wright Flyer II. It is the first of 105 flights they will make in the Flyer II during 1904.[1][10]
June – John J. Montgomery makes a series of successful test flights with his tandem-wing glider design near San Juan Bautista, California as a prototype to his successful 1905 gliders that were used to make the first high-altitude flights in heavier-than-air flying machines in the world.
20 September – Wilbur Wright makes the world's first circuit flight, in the Wright Flyer II.[1][10]
November – The Imperial Russian Navy begins conversion of the passenger ship Lahn into an aviation ship named Russ capable of handling a spherical balloon and eight kite balloons and of supporting aerial photography. Russ is the first self-propelled, seagoing ship intended specifically for aeronautical services and the first ship to employ multiple aeronautic devices.[13]
9 November – Wilbur Wright flies the Wright Flyer II a distance of 2.75 miles (4.43 km) near Dayton, Ohio, the first flight of longer than five minutes.[1][10]
Date not known – Horatio Phillips in the United Kingdom experiments with a slat-winged multiplane aircraft. It is a fully self-propelled, autonomous take-off fixed wing aircraft using an internal combustion engine and a single tractor propeller that includes its own wheeled landing gear and modern looking tail empennage. It flies for a short hop but is unstable.[14]
Notesedit
^ abcd"Aviation Timeline: World Aviation in 1904". Century of Flight. Archived from the original on 3 March 2019. Retrieved 10 April 2022.
^Renstrom, Arthur George (September 2003) [First published 1975]. Wilbur & Orville Wright: A Reissue of A Chronology Commemorating the Hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of Orville Wright, August 19, 1871(PDF). Monographs in Aerospace History. Vol. 32. NASA Publication SP-2003-4532. U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission, National Aeronautics and Space Administration. p. 7. LCCN 2003051363. Retrieved 10 April 2022.
^Campos, Eduardo (2004). "8 de Octubre de 2004, Salón de la Sociedad Italiana de San Pedro Charla sobre el primer vuelo de un aparato mas pesado que el aire en Ibero América, el "25 de Mayo de 1904"" [8 October 2004, Salon of the Sociedad Italiana de San Pedro Talk about the first flight of a heavier-than-air aircraft in Ibero America, the "25 May 1904"] (in Spanish). Aero Club San Pedro. Archived from the original on 10 August 2013. Retrieved 10 April 2022.