Bland's flight of the Mayfly made her the first woman to pilot an aircraft in Ireland.
Alongside her broader claim to fame, Lilian Bland's flight of the Mayfly at Randalstown on 31 August 1910 is also recorded as the first time a woman flew an aircraft in Ireland. Ireland in 1910 had only just begun to witness powered flight at all, and for a woman to take the controls of an aircraft she herself had designed and built was virtually unprecedented anywhere in the world, let alone in Ireland.
Accounts of the exact distance and duration of the flight vary somewhat between sources, with some describing a short hop and others a more sustained flight of several dozen yards, but the date, location, and the fact that Bland herself piloted the craft are consistently corroborated across biographical and institutional sources, including the Ulster Transport Museum and BBC retrospectives.
This achievement placed Bland — and by extension Ireland — on the map of early global aviation history. It has since become a celebrated point of national pride in Northern Ireland, commemorated through museum exhibitions, heritage plaques, and renewed public interest in the century since, particularly around the flight's various anniversaries.