Flying machine (The War of the Worlds)
The Flying machine is one of the fictional machines used by the Martians in H. G. Wells' classic 1898 science fiction novel The War of the Worlds. It is one of the four types of heavy machine the Martians bring with them when they invade Earth, along with the fighting machine, the handling machine, and the embankment machine.
Description
The appearance of this aircraft in the novel is very vague. The narrator's brother, escaping by sea, glimpses it shortly after the implied destruction of the Channel Fleet. The narrator himself sees the aircraft abandoned on the ground in London, and believes it is experimental, until he reads otherwise in a post-invasion issue of the Daily Mail. It is implied the aircraft was used to dispense the black smoke, but there is no clear confirmation of this in the text. In the original 1897 Pearson's Magazine serialized version, Wells gave more information:
It has often been asked why the Martians did not fly immediately after their arrival. They certainly did use a flying apparatus for several days, but only for brief flights of a score or so of miles, in order to reconnoitre and spread their black powder... The fact remains that they did not fly fifty miles from London all through the war. Had they done so, then the destruction they would have caused would have been infinitely greater than it was, though it could not have averted the end, of course, even by a day.
It is not known whether this version is considered canon, having only appeared, as noted, in the original magazine serialization; Wells re-edited portions of the novel before it was first published in 1898 as a hardcover book.
In other adaptations
The appearance of the flying machine has only so far been depicted once in Pendragon Pictures direct-to-video H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, where it makes an appearance after the battle with HMS Thunder Child, which is later recounted from the perspective of the artilleryman.
The flying machine appeared briefly in the live adaptation of Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of the Worlds, though the album itself does not make any reference to the craft. Many more of them appeared in the later New Generation version of the stage show.
The roughly Manta-ray-shaped war machines of George Pal's 1953 film bear no resemblance to the tripods described in Well's novel; they might be an oblique reference to the novel's Martian flying machine. Their design actually derived from a complication of making convincing walking tripods with special effects at the time, so instead were given three "invisible legs" to support and lift them from the ground. In the pilot episode of the War of the Worlds TV series, a sequel to the 1953 film, these same machines are seen but the "legs" are not present and are given more of the look of taking flight, but still possessing the speed and movement of their film counterparts.
The flying machines are also featured in both the computer game and the PlayStation game Jeff Wayne's The War of the Worlds. In the games the flying machines are equipped with one Heat-Ray and light armor, but in turn, are highly maneuverable and extremely fast. A common tactic in the PC game involves the mass production of these units in order to rush an entrenched human sector.
In Sherlock Holmes's War of the Worlds, the Martians only have a single flying machine with them, and it is described as being shaped like a traditional flying saucer. In the postscript, when the Martians invade Venus, the flying machine is shown to have been unable to handle in the planet's thicker atmosphere and so crashed onto the surface.
In Superman: War of the Worlds, the flying machine is not a separate machine; instead it is actually a part of the tripods, shown during the climax of the story: Superman tries to bring down a fighting machine by pulling its legs, only to discover that the machine's hood has detached itself and is floating in the air; the Martians have had time to adjust to Earth's gravity. He destroys it by throwing another tripod under it, negating its anti-gravity.
Scarlet Traces is a War of the Worlds sequel based on Great Britain having benefited from the Martian technology left behind after their failed invasion. While spider-like machines have dominated the means of land travel, the Martians' flying machines have greatly influenced air travel, with aircraft by 1908 looking much like modern era planes.
Flying machines appear in The Asylum's film War of the Worlds 2: The Next Wave, the sequel to H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds. The "squid-walkers" are a living race of Tripods controlled by a single entity inside the mothership. They each carry a kind of Heat Ray and need human blood to survive, so they transport living humans to the mothership to drain their blood. Their weapons are powerful enough to destroy buildings as well as humans; one scene shows a fleet of squid-walkers completely destroying London and Paris.