1903 Wright Flyer Replica

A few weeks ago I was in the lobby of the Hiller Aviation Museum when a tour guide entered followed by a group of undergraduate engineering students.   The guide stopped, pointed upwards and said, “Above us hangs an exact replica of the original 1903 Wright Brothers Flyer.  Who can tell me the year if first flew?  The students hadn’t a clue so the guide said, “It first flew in 1903.”   I wasn’t surprised that the college students had only the vaguest idea of who the Wright Brothers were.  As a flight instructor I had students who weren’t quite sure either.  The tour guide went on to say, “In 1903 other people were flying but only the Wrights knew how to turn. That’s what set them apart.  The ability to turn.  All other airplanes flew in straight lines only.”  The tour guide’s statement was not entirely correct.  We need to remember that the original Wright Flyer was an experimental craft that flew only four times and each flight was a straight line; no turns. 

If I had the opportunity to address the engineering students what points would I have stressed?  The first is that the Wright brothers were bicycle mechanics.  This, I believe, is key to understanding the Wright’s success as aircraft designers.  Their competitors felt that an airplane had to be inherently stable, just as a boat, or a carriage, or an automobile is stable.   They believed that any vehicle that could be capsized by a small wave, or easily overturned in a tight turn was unsafe.   However the bicycles the Wrights built and sold were, like all other bicycles, completely unstable.  A bicycle is held upright only by continuous small adjustments from the rider.  This is how the Wrights approached flight, and indeed many of the people who saw them fly commented that they appeared to control their craft in a fashion similar to a highly skilled bicycle ridder.  It was the very lack stability that lead to maneuverability. 

A second factor was critical to the success of the Wright brothers.   By 1900 Bernoulli’s Principle was 162 years old.  For well over one and a half centuries physicists and engineers knew exactly how a wing created lift.  In the last year of the 19th century the Wights built a glider that failed to fly do to insufficient lift.  From this failed experiment they concluded that the textbook data for airfoil efficiency was incorrect.  As a result they did something that none of their competitors had done.  They designed and built a wind tunnel to gather their own data.  When Mount Rushmore sculpture Gutzon Borglum first saw a Wright flying machine he remarked that it didn’t appear particularly impressive.  He said it looked like something boys might have hammered together in a barn.  Clearly he didn’t appreciate how innovative it actually was.  In conclusion I’d like to add that if you read only one book on the the subject it should be The Wright Brothers by David McCullough.