Since the earliest times, people have looked up to the stars and wanted to travel there. They saw birds flying and tried to build machines that would help them fly, too. Legends tell of people who used wax wings or kites to attempt to fly. These attempts, of course, did not end well.
Over hundreds of years, people built kites and boomerangs that were inspired by how birds glide through the sky. Only in the last few centuries, though, did people have the technical skills needed to build flying machines. Once flying machines became real, new words were needed to describe them.