Orville and Wilbur do the Outer banks...(NC)

I have a new appreciation for Orville and Wilbur, two bicycle repair guys from Dayton that achieved the world’s first sustained powered flight at Kitty Hawk NC.

I didn’t realize how many years they dedicated to the goal, and how much rather sophisticated testing they did prior to actual flight attempts. This was not luck – it was smarts and approaching the problem in a very orderly and scientific fashion. I also didn’t realize they had to build from scratch their own engine in order to meet their weight and power requirements, and they had to develop many of their own tools, such as wind tunnels for testing.

The first photo is from the crown of Kill Devil Hill, the launch point for their early experiments with gliders. At that time the hill and the surrounding flat lands were shifting sand allowing for a relatively soft landing, but wild grasses now keep everything reasonably in place. In the distance can be seen two plank reproductions of their living quarters and machine shop. The museum is to the right and contains reproductions of their early aircraft, their self-built wind tunnel, engine fragments, and photos.

The next photo shows granite markers indicating the end-points of the four flights on the morning of December 17, 1903. The powered flights started and ended in the flat areas; the hill was used only for the glider flights.

A view from their buildings to Kill Devil Hill would show it today topped by a Stalinist-style great monument to the Wright Brothers and their first flights. No photo, as we ran out of battery power (the modern equivalent, I guess, of running out of film).

The boys, like good brothers, took turns, and each flight beat the previous; the final flight (by Wilbur) went 852 feet in 59 seconds. Although others around the world had achieved powered hops and glides, this added the all important factor of sustained control. Regular readers (impossible) of this blog are familiar by now with the US Lifesaving Service; the boys were assisted at launch time by surfmen from the local station; in fact, the iconic photo of the first flight of the day, with Orville at the controls and Wilbur running alongside, was taken by one of the surfmen, using the Wright’s camera.

Wilbur, the older by four years, died of typhoid at the age of 45 after a trip to Boston defending their patents. Orville died in his 70s in 1948 of a heart attack. Both are buried in Ohio, not in the mausoleum-like structure on Kill Devil Hill.