To get into orbit, your ship has to move at a speed high enough so that
the Earth's gravity can't "catch it" and bring it back down. Gravity
gets weaker as you get further away from a massive object like Earth, so
the speed required to break away is called "escape velocity". It works
out to about 7 miles per second (around 25,000 MPH) for a human-scale ship.

No known airplane except the Space Shuttle can reach this kind of speed,
and only then with an extremely large amount of fuel and some serious
rocket power strapped on! The wings, of course, have nothing to do with
getting up - they're only useful coming down.

If you can't get to escape velocity, you can't truly escape Earth's
gravity no matter how high you fly - even if you've got engines that
don't use air (rockets). In fact, if you don't want to completely leave
gravity well around Earth, your ship will have to maintain "orbital
velocity" just to circle the Earth - about 17,000 MPH for a satellite.
To be "in orbit" essentially means that you are constantly falling but
always "missing" the Earth!

-Scott