La France (airship)

Two French army officers, Charles Renard and Arthur Krebs, took La France up from Chalais-Meudon near Paris on August 9, 1884, and brought it back to where it started. That return is the whole point: balloons went where the wind sent them, and this was the first powered aircraft to fly a circuit and come home. The flight lasted less than half an hour. It ran on a 9-horsepower Gramme electric motor, which makes it a surprising ancestor of today's electric airship projects.