By VICTOR KIPROP

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On December 17, 1903 Orville Wright piloted the first powered airplane seven metres above a beach in North Carolina — the first flight in history.

Now, 115 years later, innovation in aircraft technology has improved virtually every aspect of air travel.

While the 59-second first flight by the Wright brothers and a flight in the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner are worlds apart, British Airways commercial manager for Kenya Kevin Leung says that rapid advances in design and materials mean that air travel will in the next few years change radically, easing many of the factors that some flyers – especially frequent ones – now find irksome.

For instance, the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner was the first aeroplane to be made mostly from carbon-fibre reinforced plastic, rather than aluminium. It has changed one of the main factors affecting one’s experience of air-travel — pressure in the cabin.

“For many years, cabins have been pressurised to the equivalent of 8,000 feet, the maximum pressurisation that aircraft airframes have been able to handle. But the carbon-composite composition of advanced airframes, like that of the Dreamliner, allow cabins to be pressurised more than conventional aluminium airframes,” Kevin says.

Research shows that 80 per cent of the food humans taste is influenced by smell, which in turn is affected by humidity. Nasal passages need to be moist to smell, and as the air aboard most aeroplanes is drier than desert air, the food can taste bland.

Recent research has shown that noise influences taste too: Loud background noise seems to lead to food being perceived as less sweet and less salty than food eaten in quiet surroundings.

“This is why airline catering is an art and why food is often more robustly flavoured than it would be in a restaurant on the ground. As ambient noise in airline cabins decreases due to the better insulation afforded by space-age materials like carbon-composites, so will food be flavoured differently,” Kevin says.

Another innovation in years to come may be the elimination of windows, replacing them with thin, light, high-definition screens that would show passengers the passing world outside the aircraft.

This would reduce the weight of the aircraft and the claustrophobia occasionally experienced by some passengers, making the flight more comfortable.