Flying vehicles in Sanskrit literature: the aerial chariots and palaces of the epics and the Puranas, most famously the Pushpaka of the Ramayana, and the flying cities of the Mahabharata along with the weapons deployed from them.
What the texts actually contain
Descriptions of divine conveyances in a literary register, with no dimensions, no mechanisms and no construction accounts, in a corpus whose gods routinely fly without vehicles at all. The passages that most excite the technology reading, the Mahabharata’s Brahmastra with its column of smoke and its aftermath of sickness and stillbirth, are the ones most often quoted without their context or their date.
The Vaimanika Shastra
The text usually offered as an ancient aeronautical manual is not ancient. It was produced between 1918 and 1923 by Pandit Subbaraya Shastry, who described it as channelled from the sage Bharadwaja, and was first published in 1973. In 1974 a team at the Indian Institute of Science examined the described craft and concluded they were unairworthy, with geometry and propulsion that would not fly. Christopher Dunn and the wider ancient-technology literature reach for the Mahabharata material as corroboration; the corroboration is a nineteenth-century-to-twentieth-century document and a set of poetic passages.
Connections
Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis · Erich von Daniken · Christopher Dunn · The Giza Power Plant · Dendera Reliefs · Ancient Aliens · The Wars of Gods and Men · Zecharia Sitchin