Time Traveller First Seaplane Flight, 1910

In December, as election campaigns of the two major parties in India heated up in poll-bound Gujarat, the flag-bearers seemed to be engaged in a game of one-upmanship. On December 12, 2017, Prime Minister Narendra Modi outdid everyone&rsquos speculation as he took a seaplane ride from Sabarmati River in Ahmedabad to Dharoidam in Mehsana. The BJP isn&rsquot new to publicity stunts, and to their credit, their stunts usually prove to be crowd-pleasers. But when, on the same day, Mr Modi&rsquos website (narendramodi.in) carried a story that called him &ldquothe first passenger of India&rsquos first ever seaplane&rdquo, the party had stretched the truth too far. (Though in times like these, fact has little relevance.) While some of the mainstream media blindly shared the hype on their websites, others on the fringes like Alt News went on to debunk the myth by recalling India&rsquos actual  first seaplane commercial service, Jal Hans, which was inaugurated in December 2010 in the Andamans. (It is now stalled.) The PM&rsquos website retraced its steps and modified the headline of its story, but some news websites have retained their original, incorrect web articles.

The world's first seaplane flight[/caption]

Henri Fabre, who designed the seaplane[/caption]

We at a travel magazine couldn&rsquot help but wonder at the brouhaha of vikas over a seaplane ride. Is it really a revolutionary development if the world&rsquos first seaplane flight happened over a century ago In these pictures, we present a glimpse of the day when the first seaplane took off from water under its own power at &Eacutetang de Berre in France for a 500-metre-long jump and a height of over five metres on March 28, 1910. On board was Henri Fabre, who had also designed the canard-configuration seaplane later named Hydravion. Of course, the technology has grown in leaps and bounds since, and seaplanes have become a common sight in many countries. In fact, they&rsquore often used by groups of affluent tourists for reaching remote island resorts in destinations like the Maldives. But none of those facts could deter some Indian news sites from drawing parallels between Mr Modi and James Bond for a simple seaplane flight.