The Airplane - Jay Spenser [9]
Orville moved the lever that released a restraining cable and simultaneously started automatic recording instruments aboard the Flyer. The winged craft accelerated down its wooden guide rail, Wilbur running alongside to steady its wings.
Mindful of what had happened before, Orville gently nudged the Flyer aloft, careful not to hold too much up-elevator. Pitch control was extremely ticklish, he realized. Despite his best efforts, the craft porpoised through the air.
But he was flying! A full 120 feet (37 meters) of sand passed beneath the Flyer before its skids contacted the ground after twelve seconds.
History had been made—the world’s first airplane had flown.
Wilbur watches as Orville performs history’s first airplane flight on December 17, 1903.
Library of Congress
To those watching, it had unfolded with uncanny slowness. The Flyer, designed to cruise at about 32 mph (50 km/h), had flown into a wind that averaged 25 mph (40 km/h). Like a fish swimming against a fast-moving current, its progress over the sand had been reduced to 7 mph (11 km/h)—slow enough that Wilbur might have kept up had there been firm ground to run on.
As instructed, Daniels had scrambled to Orville’s pre-positioned box camera. By the time he took his famous picture, Wilbur had given up the chase and was watching in awe. His awkward body posture in this iconic image—a treasured instant of human achievement captured on glass plate—speaks to wonder and triumph as few photographs ever have.
Taking turns, the brothers flew three more times that day. All takeoffs were performed from level ground solely by the power of the engine that they had designed and built. Those flights averaged about 10 feet (3 meters) in altitude. The longest—the Flyer’s fourth and Wilbur’s second—lasted a full fifty-nine seconds and covered 852 feet (260 meters) over the ground, or more than half a mile through the moving air.
Elated, the team carried the craft back to camp and set it down in what they thought was a safe spot. An exhilarated conversation ensued that was cut short by a savage gust of wind. It lifted the Flyer and began flipping it over.
“All made a dash to stop it but we were too late,” Orville later wrote. “Mr. Daniels, a giant in stature and strength, was lifted off his feet and, falling inside between the surfaces, was shaken about like a rattle in a box as the machine rolled over and over. He finally fell out upon the sand with nothing worse than painful bruises.”2
The world’s first airplane would never fly again, but it had fulfilled its purpose. A quarter century later, its disassembled remains—which survived a flood during storage in the Wright basement—were lovingly restored by Orville, the surviving Wright brother.
Today the Wright 1903 Flyer, one of the crown jewels of the Smithsonian collection, is displayed for all to see at the National Air and Space Museum, in Washington, D.C. Every human being can feel proud of this world heritage artifact.
Viewing this proto-airplane, now more than a century old, one might well wonder how two brothers from Ohio came to solve the horrendous unknowns of flight. How did they conjure into being, whole and working, something that had never before existed on the face of the earth?
Traditional explanations have it that the Wrights succeeded through sheer pluck, determination, and good old American know-how. This unhelpful answer, the product of mythmaking by a proud nation, provides no insights. Worse still, it falsely implies that the airplane could not have been invented anywhere but in the United States.
Then how did the Wrights change the world on the sands of Kitty Hawk? The answer has two parts, the first being the immediate human tale as told in this chapter. The second, the technology side of the story, is sprinkled among this book’s subsequent chapters, each of which examines a different aspect of flight technology.
The Wright brothers were self-taught aeronautical engineers with little if any formal scientific training. Gifted