The Wright Way to the Skyway

"Excuse me ladies and gentlemen this is your captain speaking. I'm turning on the seatbelt sign and I'm going to ask you to go ahead and sit down and fasten your seatbelts. It looks like there is going to be a little turbulence ahead." A little turbulence now is nothing compared to what Orville and Wilbur Wright went through to make their dream of a full-size flying machine become a reality. After years of research, prototypes and life-threatening experimentation, The Wright Brothers changed the world in a mere 12 seconds.

A small rubber-band powered toy was what sparked the brothers' imagination of creating a flying machine. "Our father came into the house one evening with some object partly concealed in his hands and before we could see what it was, he tossed it into the air. Instead of falling to the floor, as we expected, it flew across the room... Its memory was abiding," Orville reminisced.

When Wilbur was 22 and Orville was 18, the brothers opened their own printing office. A few years later, in 1893, the brothers became interested in bicycles and opened the Wright Cycle Company. However, the flight of the rubber-band toy had always remained in the back Wilbur's mind. Wilbur had one idea in mind: FLYING!

Wilbur immediately started reading everything he could concerning the state of human flight. It became his hobby, his obsession. After studying all available research, Wilbur decided to request more from the Smithsonian Institution. He also unofficially announced his plan to begin a "systematic study of the subject in preparation for actual work."

A month or so later, the brothers began their quest and built their first biplane. The plane was constructed of wood and cloth with a wingspan of five feet and a chord of 13 inches. The plane was meant to be flown as a kite to test the brothers' ideas about controlling the forces of flight.

The results of the test flight must have been somewhat successful because the following summer the brothers decided to leave Dayton, Ohio, where they had been doing most of their work, and go to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Orville and Wilbur were also ready to experiment with their new design. They decided to use Otto Lilienthal's scientific data tables to calculate the size and shape of their new full-sized flying machine. Ironically, Lilienthal crashed and died in a hang gliding accident four years earlier. The glider's wing frames were made of bent ash wood and covered with a high-quality French sateen fabric. The remaining wooden pieces were made from white pine. The total wing span was 17 feet and the chord was five feet. In the center of the bottom wing, there was a space in the center for the pilot to lie down in. The total weight of the plane, including one of the brothers onboard, was only 190 pounds.

In 1900, the brothers flew their "manned kite" only to find that the wind was not strong enough to lift a man. However it did allow them to test the design of the kite. Sadly, the glider was damaged from strong winds and it was back to the drawing boards once again. A year later, the result was a new plane almost twice the size of the previous flying machine. They solved some of the lift problems of the 1900 glider by building the new plane exactly to the size specified by Lilienthal's lift calculations.

It was testing time once again. The first few tests were almost disasters as the plane nearly crashed. This was puzzling, for the 1900 glider had worked better. To solve the problem, Wilbur decided to take the wings apart and rebuild them. The result was an encouraging glide of 389 feet. However, after studying the events of the 1900 and 1901, Wilbur began thinking that Lilienthal's lift tables were completely wrong. Another ironic situation since Lilienthal was the famous international expert on the forces of flight and Wilbur was only a hobbyist who had not even graduated high school. Regardless, Wilbur was finding that the numbers were not working. Wilbur also realized that they could not continue building gliders on the old data tables, so he decided to experiment with models in order to create his own calculations.

On December 17, 1903, after two years of experimentation, the Wright Brothers finally made their dream into a reality. On this bitterly cold and windy Friday morning, Orville got into the plane for the "first flight." And it was not a smooth one at that. The flight was extremely erratic due to the irregularity of the air and lack of flying experience. A design flaw in the rudder caused the machine to suddenly rise to about 10 feet and then suddenly dart for the ground. Orville later wrote, "This flight lasted only 12 seconds, but it was nevertheless the first in the history of the world in which a machine carrying a man had raised itself by its own power into the air in full flight, had sailed forward without reduction of speed and finally landed at a point as high as that from which it started."

Of course Wilbur had to fly it also, so he took the "second flight." Wilbur's flight was also erratic, and only lasted a second longer than Orville's first. However, Wilbur's flight covered about 75 more feet. The brothers then each took a second flight. Orville's second flight was 15 seconds and covered a little over 200 feet. Wilbur's second flight was the best of the day as he flew a distance of 852 feet and flew for 59 seconds.

This design was improved upon to make the planes that we all know today...and we owe it all to two high school drop outs that were encouraged by a toy.

Information from: http://www.fi.edu/flights/first/flyer.html

http://www.fi.edu/flights/first/before.html

http://www.fi.edu/flights/first/during.html

Specifications of the flyer:

-gasoline-powered engine weighed 179 pounds, delivered 12 horsepower

-2 propeller, each 8.5 feet in diameter

-propeller made of 3 layers of 1 1/8 inch spruce, glued together, shaped with hatchet drawshave

-wingspan=40 feet, 4 inches

-chord=6 feet, 6 inches

-wing chamber=1:20

-total wing area= 510 square feet

-horizontal forward rudder=48 square feet

-distance from nose to tail= 21 feet, 1 inch

-unmanned weight= 605 pounds (including engine, propellers, and chain drive)

-wing skeleton covered with white French sateen fabric

-propeller shafts made of steel