When were military aircraft created?

Barely six years after the Wright brothers' flight, the US Army Signal Corps accepted the Wright Military Flyer in August 1909, following trials at Fort Myer that required carrying a passenger at 40 mph for an hour. Earlier, in 1908, an accident during those same trials had cost the life of Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, aviation's first military fatality. France, Germany and the United Kingdom set up their own air services between 1909 and 1912, intended almost exclusively for observation.

The first wartime use was Italian: on 23 October 1911, during the war against the Ottoman Empire in Libya, Captain Carlo Piazza flew a Blériot XI over the Turkish lines, and a week later Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti dropped hand grenades from his Etrich Taube. In 1914 aircraft entered the First World War as the eyes of artillery; to stop the enemy from observing, the first fighters with synchronized machine guns appeared (the Fokker Eindecker in 1915) and, shortly after, large bombers such as the Gotha and the Handley Page.

By the end of the war the division still used today already existed: fighter, bomber, reconnaissance, trainer and transport. The 1930s added the all-metal monoplane with retractable gear and enclosed cockpit, the Second World War brought radar and the jet engine, and the Cold War the guided missile and supersonic flight. Today the formula is rounded off with drones and low-observability fighters, but the underlying idea remains the same as in 1911: see further than the enemy and deny them that same view.