Candlelight cast the airplane's enormous shadow across the dome, making it look like some creature spreading its wings.
To invent a flying machine, Leonardo da Vinci had focused intently on the way pigeons beat their wings—something the human eye should not have been able to catch. Yet whether through talent or relentless perseverance, he had done it. But like most people of his era, he believed flight required wings. Whether wings made of wax or those behind angels' backs, they were covered in light feathers. They needed to create a machine capable of imitating the wingbeats of birds.
Yet the devices designed for that purpose were complex and heavy, making flight even less practical. Modern people knew that airplanes flew because of invisible air. It created not only resistance, but lift as well. An airplane's engine supplied the power to move forward, but the "trick" lay in the unequal design of the upper and lower surfaces of its wings. Biplanes were designed that way to compensate for insufficient engine power. Their speed was not enough, so the only solution was to increase the pressure difference and wing area. Once engines became powerful enough, the wings became monoplanes.
Yet these airplanes did not bring the joy of free flight people had imagined. London, which had escaped many wars thanks to the English Channel, was subjected to massive bombing raids by German aircraft. Countless people were displaced, and those pilots sitting in cockpits, pressing buttons to drop bombs, were not Messengers from The Paradise.
An angel's "proper duty" was to deliver messages. Hermes in the Greek pantheon held the same post, except he wore winged shoes.
Sometimes these "Messengers" did more than convey news; they had other missions as well. For instance, the fallen angel Samael, representing wrath, successfully completed the task