Eighty-seven years ago today, at the Heinkel works at Rostock-Marienehe, a small aeroplane left the grass with no propeller turning in front of it. The He 178, flown by Erich Warsitz, stayed up for a few minutes at low altitude and came back down. As departures go it was brief, and it was noisy, and it was the first of its kind anywhere in the world.

Warsitz was the sort of pilot who kept saying yes. He had already flown rocket-assisted trials and, that June, the rocket-powered He 176 — so being strapped into somebody's experiment was, by then, more or less the job. The engine behind him was Hans von Ohain's turbojet, and behind that a shed full of fitters who had spent months persuading it to run at all without coming apart. That first hop belonged to them as much as to anyone in the seat.

The machine in the photograph below looks unremarkable: rounded nose intake, high straight wings, a fixed tailwheel, plain sky. It is a very ordinary-looking little aircraft to be standing at the front of a timetable that now runs to millions of departures a year.