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Science Technology

Re-Building the Wright Flyer 175

Posted by timothy from the we-hope-they-wear-modern-helmets dept.
Isaac-Lew writes: "Several teams are trying to build a working replica of the first Wright Brothers' airplane." As the article says, "The catch is: Each team wants its plane to fly more or less as the Wrights' did." The only problem with that is that as Orville Wright put it, their plane was "exceedingly erratic," so the recreators have made some slight concessions to safety.
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Re-Building the Wright Flyer More

Re-Building the Wright Flyer

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  • They're trying to build a version to fly at Kitty Hawk for the centennial celebration of the original flight, December 17th 1903.
    • How much do you wanna bet the weather won't cooparate with that one?

      I can see a Nor'Easter blowing up the coast already....
    • They're trying to build a version to fly at Kitty Hawk for the centennial celebration of the original flight, December 17th 1903.

      Not to belabour the point - but why?

      Sure, it was an important achievement, but what's the point? And why have more than one team? Bragging rights are all that seems to be on the line here. So, in the race to build the first, best replica, a number of teams are devoting a lot of time and resources to a project that will add nothing to the body of human knowledge and experience - regardless of the outcome.

      So I will ask the obvious question again. Why? There is nothing wrong with marking the occasion, but this is way OTT.

      • Re:Answering the obvious question - why? (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Because many aeronautical engineers have looked at Flyer-1 and they aren't really sure how it can fly at all. By building one and attempting to get it airborne, this question an be answered.
      • The correct answer is, "Why the F*CK not???".

        These guys are fanboys of the Wrights. They have the time and the money (or sponsorship) to do it. So f*cking what if it "will add nothing to the body of human knowledge and experience".

        To put it in the words of Sir George Mallory (sp?): "Because it's there!"
  • "The recreators have made some slight concessions to safety." Bah! If you're going to recreate it, recreate it all the way including the "risks" If you're afraid of cracking your head open, wear a helmut!

  • personally... (Score:2, Funny)

    by hype7 ( 239530 )
    I'd be much more interested to see them try to recreate Da Vinci's one :)

    ::evil laugh::

    After his first flight, he refused to talk about it again :)

    -- james

  • Exceedingly Erratic == Unsafe (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Coz ( 178857 ) on Monday February 18, 2002 @08:41AM (#3025936) Homepage Journal
    I spent some time looking at various web sites about this yesterday - seems the original Flyer would Dutch roll from take-off to landing, and was very unfriendly in ground-effect. This made landing - interesting - until they finally cracked it up. Good thing it went so slowly that it didn't hurt so much when they hit.

    By today's standards, the thing's unflyable - horrible control authority, CG all wrong, underpowered... Orville and Wilbur had to be talented in the first place to fly it. Of course, this is the basic device that we started from to derive "today's standards". I hope none of the replica teams crack up... there's enough aviation hysteria these days, without a "reenactment" generating more bad press.

    Must be fun, inventing a whole science, and a set of industries.
    • My understanding having watched some things on TLC, the Discovery Channel, PBS, etc., is that some teams have already produced the flyer, they just can't get it to fly. And they have NO IDEA how the Wright Bros. were able to get the original one off the ground. The idea was that they've been doing this for years and can't get it to fly.

      I'll believe they can get it to fly when I see it. :) The thing was built specifically for the original pilot's weight, height etc. Also as you point out, it took a lot of skill to fly that thing... way more than a pilot needs today.

      • They used a jeep to pull it. The first self-propelled, self-take-offing airplane was Alberto Santos Dumont's [slashdot.org] BIS-14.

        He is recognized as th father of aviation in many countries, especially France and his native Brazil. (Where we have never heard of the Wright brothers. In fact, I wouldn't learn about them until I moved to the U.S. from Brazil.)

    • Re:Exceedingly Erratic == Unsafe (Score:4, Interesting)

      by thogard ( 43403 ) on Monday February 18, 2002 @09:47AM (#3026110) Homepage
      I've been reading rec.aviation.student [news] for a number of years.
      One problem that all student pilots have is that they start overcontrolling the plane after about 10 hours. Most students are better at flying a modern (1960s?) airplane after 5 hours of instruction than at 10 hours. The reason is they try to compensate for every small dip. The planes dihedral will be doing the same adjsutments and the result is the plane goes the other way like any over controlled system. It can take another 10 hours to unlearn over controlling. I suspect that anyone with a 1/2 decent grasp of flying will over control the eary Wright flyers. Were the Wright brothers even controlling the plane or just along for the ride?

      There is a nice landing strip near the Wright Brothers Memorial called First Flight. Just don't park there for more than 24 hours or a park ranger will give you a parking ticket.
    • > CG all wrong, underpowered..

      Why would they need a ChainGun?
    • There is a story about a British glider pilot, who created an exact replica of (I believe) a Percy Pilcher glider, to fly on the 100th anniversary of his death.
      In order to make the replica realistic, the materials, and construction method used were closely modelled on those available at the time, and the first flight took place from exactly the same spot that Pilcher had taken off a hundred years previously.
      The subsequent accident was an exact replica of Pilchers', except that the pilot was rushed to hospital by ambulance, and consequently survived his injuries.
    • For those curious what a Dutch roll is. From this site [nasa.gov]:

      Dutch roll diagram [nasa.gov]
      The second oscillation is known as the Dutch roll (named for the motion of an ice skater). According to one NASA research pilot, an airplane in the Dutch roll mode "resembles a snake slithering." Obviously, this is not a desirable way to travel off the ground. This complex oscillation combines several factors including yaw, roll, dihedral effect, lift, and drag. In a Dutch roll, the airplane's nose typically rotates through about three degrees. When an airplane tries to find the runway, there is only about one degree of margin for safe runway touchdowns.
  • Won't they be in for a surprse when they find out it doesn't fly? Flying is a myth, just like that government-sponsored tale about men walking on the moon.

    It says so in my 1962 Soviet Encyclopedia.

  • Why are there "secrets"? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by phr2 ( 545169 ) on Monday February 18, 2002 @08:49AM (#3025963)
    The part about discouraging workshop photographs in order to not leak info to the competition is weird. What modern high tech processes are there to protect, if you're trying to do something the same way it was done 100 years ago? I'd have thought most of the interest in a project like this was in being as open and historically accurate as possible.
    • I blame BattleBots and the USPTO and First Post!

      Every design, new or old, has to be a stealth thing that emerges fully formed from the shop;

      Everything has to be protected, numbered, and stamped "mine", new or not;

      Anyone check to see if the teams are made up of denied FP'ers?

      ;-)

  • Warning!! (Score:3, Funny)

    by JJ ( 29711 ) on Monday February 18, 2002 @08:53AM (#3025966) Homepage Journal
    Don't fly!!!!! You'll get too close to the sun and your wings will melt. (This from another early flight pioneer.)

  • Which approach should be taken in this case (Score:3, Interesting)

    by shockwaverider ( 78582 ) on Monday February 18, 2002 @09:02AM (#3025977)
    There are two approaches that can be taken when restoring/rebuilding things

    a) Make it exactly as it was
    b) Make it better

    Usually I'd say that you should always make it exactly as it was, but in this case lives would be at stake if you followed that approach - So there's an argument for at least *some* improvement.

    The question is - how far should they go in their improvements...

    • Wtf? Why not get a Cessna or something then? That is a 'improved' version. I mean, if they are going to build a replica celebrating the flight of 1903, they should make it excatly (sp) the same. (IMHO, of course)

    • "Everything will be authentic. "There is no purpose, in our opinion, to not be," he said"

      They even contradict themselves. They tell us it will be authentic while making concessions that The Wright Brothers would not make.

      Does not sound like it is authentic if they use better glue, materials, etc. I do not like to hear about re-creations going bad more then anything, but it seems a little outregous that people are spending so much time and money to test this plane to make it better. Why not just buy a cesna, save money, and fly that and say its a recreation of the first flight?

      I guess I just do not see the thrill in watching people fly a plane that is supposed to be authentic when it really is not.

      • Usually I'd say that you should always make it exactly as it was, but in this case lives would be at stake if you followed that approach

      Any reason it has to have a live pilot? How about a crash test dummy and some remote controls?

      Or (even better) how about an onboard or offboard expert system? There's a nice limited set of variables to work on: height 0 - 3 metres, speed as fast as you can manage, go in a straight line. Seems like an ideal application.

    • There was an article in Air&Space about a restoration of a WWI vintage airplane. It turns out the original had a flaw in the fuel tank baffles that starved the engine during rolls. To keep the plane as original as possible, they utilized the same type of flawed-baffle system even though a fix for the problem was easily contrived. Such exactness is extremely important to the restoration crowd. That's according to my memory though...
    • I helped set up the replica at the Wilbur Wright birthplace museum near Millville, Indiana USA.
      We bought it from a guy in Illinois, name Buford Gross, who had built it to fly, though he chickened out and sold it to a museum, rather than risk damaging it. He built it with a synthetic fiber (dacron, i think) covering instead of cotton, because the FAA wouldn't let him fly it otherwise.
      I just checked with a member of the museum board (my dad), and he informs me that Buford had added the 1905 flyer control enhancement (steerable rudder) as well. I'd just assumed that was accurate. No wonder a 1903 flyer is almost uncontrollable!
  • They might have tried to reconstitute Clement Ader's Eole [www.aopa.ch] but actually it seems the Wright brothers were the first who could prove they had flown.

    Remind me of a movie [imdb.com] :-)

    • Eole (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Balinares ( 316703 )
      Eole was destroyed, but its immediate successor is displayed in full view [arts-et-metiers.net] in the CNAM museum [arts-et-metiers.net] in Paris. A heck of an impressive sight, I can tell you. :)

      The blurb seems to say Eole was built between 1882 and 1889 and first flew in 1890, so if true that puts it slightly ahead of the Wright brothers' Kitty Hawk Flyer, but it's not like it matters much, for what we care. :)
    • What's interesting is that the hotbed of aviation in the 1906-1912 period was NOT the USA. It was France, who made up for lost time very quickly by building a lot of very innovative designs, designs that served as the basis for today's airplanes in terms of aerodynamic and structural design.

      In that period, French pioneers like Alberto Santos-Dumont, Louis Blériot and the Duperdussin company were building monoplanes that used modern aerodynamic design. Indeed, the Duperdussin racer of 1912 had extremely sleek aerodynamics for its day thanks to the use of monocoque structural design.

      In short, while the Wright brothers built the first successful heavier-than-air airplane, it was the French pioneers that laid the groundwork for designing the modern airplane.

  • Hmm. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Moosechees ( 194176 )
    Living near Dayton, OH, we're always hearing about stuff like this. I just helped rebuild this site [wright-b-flyer.org] about the Wright Brothers Flyer and go to Wright State University [wright.edu]. Also, I hear Stickman uses one on occasion [fuq.it].
    • You could also go down and ride in a replica Wright 'B' flier at the Dayton/Wright Brothers airport. [airnav.com] (Near I75-I675 split) Can't miss it, they drew the faces of the brothers on the side of the building!
      For $600, (donation to upkeep/rent/etc) they will strap you in the 2nd seat, taxi to one end of the run way, and fly to the other end, and taxi back.
      It is 60% original, as the FCC will not allow a fully wooden aircraft to be certified.
      They do fly it on rare occasions from their airport to the WPAFB ~30 miles north, and load it into a C-5 (or some other huge plane) for special shows. It was wild seeing this thing rock back and forth as I was driving I-675, seeing is believing!
      • 5'16" is easy math, so why do so many miss it?

        OK, I'll bite...Six feet, four inches? Or are these Troy inches? ;)

        GTRacer
        - must...sleep...now...

  • Some folks, mainly from New Zealand, make a strong case that Richard Pearse [nzhistory.net.nz] made the first powered flight. Pearse belives it was in March, 1904, but others claim March, 1903 or even 1902. Even if he wasn't first, his design is surprising modern: " a monoplane configuration, wing flaps and rear elevator, tricycle undercarriage with steerable nosewheel, and a propeller with variable-pitch blades driven by a unique double-acting horizontally opposed petrol engine."
    • Give Me A Break. Richard Pearse says in his own letter that he never achieved true flight and that he did not beat the Wright brothers.

    • The french (no reference, but I think it is true) had pwered flight for years before the wright brothers. The wright brothers however were able to maintain [semi]controlled flight for several hours, while the french made uncontrolled hops of up to 200 feet before crashing controllably.

    • Re:Were the Wrights first? (Score:5, Informative)

      by =Egon= ( 182799 ) on Monday February 18, 2002 @11:51AM (#3026657)
      No, they werent.

      Santos Dumont was the first to accomplish a full flight. It took off alone and it landed. The wrights only got some seconds in the air, and this because they were thrown with the help of a machine
      You may check that with any history teacher.
      But why some people (eg. the americans) dont give him the credits is a whole other story.

      • Heh heh... I was travelling around Minas Gerais, Brazil, when my hosts brought me to the museum. I'd never heard of Santos-Dumont until that point. We debated it for a while, but as my Portuguese wasn't all that good I could never get the finer points across- not that I had any fine points to make since the first "flight" at Kitty Hawk consisted of being flung off a catapult and landing a few seconds later and I really couldn't argue against a self powered takeoff and landing.

        But after a magnificent dinner and a night bar hopping around Belo Horizonte, and meeting some great guys and some fine women, and having one of the best nights of my life, I was willing to concede them their spot in history. OK, so I sold out for alcohol and the company of women, but it was well worth it!

  • First flight (Score:2, Interesting)

    by pkplex ( 535744 )
    Of course you blokes all know that kiwis were the first to fly, right? :)

    Fair go, its true.
  • The place that I work is working with one of the teams to ensure that manufacture and treatment of the fabric used is as close as possible to the original. "Another area of research...is the determination of the finish used on the fabric. Air proofing the fabric may have been a trade secret of the Wright Brothers. There was mention of a finish in the Wright brother's log book, but never mentioned again."

    I'm not using any names because I'm not sure that I'm allowed. I'm just one of the IT guys...
  • I wonder what distro will be running one it?!?!
  • I think they are being a bit too cautious. It seems that all the teams, being worried about safety have forgotten a couple things about the airplane that do not apply to any plane they have ever known.

    The fact is, that the Wright flyer only flew 12 seconds on that first flight, and I'm sure it didn't do it very quickly, or very high up. I highly doubt that a crash in the flyer would really do that much damage to the pilot. After all, the Wrights themselves seemed to come out of the final crash that first day with no ill effects. I doubt they even had protective pads on!

    So if their goal is to crecreate the plane and recreate that first flight--I think folks are fretting just a bit too much about "safety" issues. These guys need to grow some cohones....
  • I've noticed some posts along the line of "Safety first, authenticity later".
    I couldn't disagree more. If you're not going to try to duplicate the entire effort, including the not insubstantial risks involved with the dawn of any new era, what is the point? You might as well build an "Almost Scale" RC model and fly it around. It would serve exactly the same purpose with no risk. I'm not saying that all possible safety precautions shouldn't be taken (external to the airplane itself), but build it to origional spec, then decide to fly it or not.
    I guess my point here is that I make the concious decision to get on my old BMW motorcycle every morning. I know it's dangerous, but it's also exciting and a throwback to a time, not so long ago, that we took risks in the name of advancement and the simple thrill of being alive. Recreating the Wright Flyer to modern standards is just a symptom of our overly cautious, airbag equipped, warning label on the coffie times.
    Of course this will be modded down, my target audiance sits in a cube all day and considers a walk in the park an outing.

  • Wrong Way Round (Score:2, Insightful)

    by nmg196 ( 184961 )
    The main trouble is - they flew it backwards. If they turned it around a flew it the other way, then they wouldn't have all the instability problems you get with carard configuration aircraft... IMHO.

    I wonder whether turning it round counts as a "consession to safety".... :)

    Nick...
    • The trouble with the modern configuration, however, is that it's less efficient. In the canard configuration both surfaces are lifing up, while in the modern or conventional configuration, the horizontal stabilizer in back lifts down. That would have required the wright flyer to have more efficient wings, and perhaps even more thrust.
  • > was "exceedingly erratic," so the recreators
    > have made some slight concessions to safety.

    Are there any real men out there? I mean, what's that stuff with "slight concessions to safety"?

    If those guys had the guts, they'd fly the darned thing with nothing but their pyjamas on and for the real daring, there's always the option to use Win XP as a flight controller (which should just get them that "exceedingly erratic" behaviour)!

    C. M. Burns
    • Although humorous, there are some real observations historians have made pointing out that massive government intervention in daily life snuffs out the innovative spirit. A great state is produced by great men, not the other way around.

      When people grow up, generation after generation, in a world where they must get two dozen permission slips to perform this or that experiment, it does have an effect on the number of innovations. Remove the profit motive, and you're really in a world of hurt.

  • There must be something that's a little bit special about this. When I read that one of these efforts is taking place just a few miles down the road from me (in Glen Ellyn, IL), I got excited. So did my kids.

    It seems like such an audacious thing to do: and it's audacious times four.

    Makes what all those boys were doing around the turn of the 20th century seem that much more amazing. Hats off to all.

  • Thought I'd do my bit for British Tourism and point out there is a pretty fantastic replica and some other groovy stuff at the science museum [sciencemuseum.org.uk] - all free to get in and they've also got some groovy robot stuff and a real Cray 1 (looks like a sixties sofa, you'll see what I mean if you go there!).
    • ... with an admitted US-centric bent.

      The Air Force Museum [af.mil] at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton OH. Those of you who are pretty quick will note that Dayton is where the Wright Brothers made their airplane, and the museum is located at the old location of Wright Field, named after the brothers. (The base itself is a combination of Wright and Patterson Fields - thus the name "Wright-Patterson". Wow!)

      There is a full-scale replica of the Wright 1909 Military Flyer [af.mil].

      Cheers,
      Brian
  • The first powered flight was conducted by John Stringfellow in 1848, more than 50 years before the Wright Bros. And well before other claimants light Pearse and Adler.

    http://www.somerset.zynet.co.uk/attract/char_mus .h tml

    So there.

    • The Wright brothers' flight is considered the milestone because it satisfied the four characteristics that had never all been matched at once before:
      • They used a heavier-than-air vehicle
      • The vehicle was self-powered (not a glider)
      • It carried a human passenger (yes, models and children's toys had been satisfying the other three criteria for decades, but using an airplane as a form of transportation was new)
      • They sustained the flight for 12 seconds
      • The reason the Wright brothers are given the credit for the first real heavier than air aircraft is because their design principles turned out to be scalable - they were able to take the Flyer and turn it into an airplane capable of sustained, controllable flight. None of the other designs were capable of being turned into something that was really usable for more than a flight of a few seconds.

  • And if none of the replicas work, then suddenly we realize the original flight was a fake, and there's no such thing as aviation, and then all the planes that have been flying under the power of make-believe all along fall out of the sky. Or something like that.

  • Flying old aeroplanes - Rhinebeck Aerodrome (Score:3, Informative)

    by dpilot ( 134227 ) on Monday February 18, 2002 @10:29AM (#3026285) Homepage Journal
    In the mid-Hudson valley there's a place called "The Rhinebeck Aerodrome", where they have a combination ground museum and flight show of old aeroplanes. I took the family there, a few years ago, and saw quite a show.

    I'm not enough of a student of history to remember most of the things they flew, but some of them were OLD. One of the newer things was a Sopwith Camel - as in Snoopy, the WWI flying Ace. Some of the planes took off at one end of the runway, flew the length at about 20 ft altitude, and landed at the other end. One really old plain had not conventional control surfaces - it worked by warping the wing surfaces.

    The Sopwith Camel was interesting in that (apparently like other planes of its time) it had no throttle. But it did have a new innovation. The engine had nine cylinders, but four could be shut off. To get the same effect as throttling, the pilot ran on nine, five, or no cylinders. It was interesting to hear, when flying.
  • Sorry, but it's been done before many times. There are at least two functional Wright Flyers on display in my native state of North Cackalacki, and there's one replica here in Mesa at the Champlain Fighter Museum at Falcon Field.
  • They could do a Mr. Wright's clone to fly the plane.
  • If you go to the Wright Brothers Museum in Kitty Hawk, NC, there is a life size replica of the exact machine that the brothers flew. I was there just last month so a bunch of the details are still fresh in my head.

    There replica was fully functional (minus the ability to fly). Basically, it had all the wiring hooked up to control the pitch, roll and yaw of the plane. To adjust the pitch, you pulled a lever in from of the pilot. To adjust the roll and yaw, you push the pilot's hips in a direction. To reduce the amount of controls, they had the roll and yaw hooked up to a single control.

    While there I learned some pretty neat stuff that I had never realized. In order to get off the ground they needed a really light engine, but at the time engines weighed about 500lbs. So they hired a machinest to build them an aluminum engine (the first ever built). It weighed about 150 lbs and was a perfect counter-balance to whomever was flying the plane (engine on one side, pilot on the other).

    The best part of there design was the safety devices they added. All they had was a wood bar in front of the pilot that he could grab onto in case of a crash.

    • > All they had was a wood bar in front of the
      > pilot that he could grab onto in case of a
      > crash.

      I'm sorry, Mr. Wright. You just don't meet current FAA, NTSB, OSHA, and a dozen and a half, squared, other standards. You are disallowed from attempting this. Oh, and you might hit a bird, which might be an endangered species, so you are also prevented, even if you fix all the other issues.

    • and was a perfect counter-balance to whomever was flying the plane (engine on one side, pilot on the other).

      Except that they used two engines, counter-rotating to negate gyro effects, and the pilot was between them.
  • In 1960, some U of Washington students built a replica [museumofflight.org] of the 1902 Wright glider. There's a picture hanging on the wall in the Aeronautics/Aerospace building of the group of guys that did it. They're all standing next to their glider on a grassy hill. It's pretty cool.

    To those of you asking why anyone would spend their time building a replica of an old airplane or glider, I say this: Designing aircraft is not all engineering and science. There's an art to it and a few people truly find joy in it.
    • Some years ago an uncle of mine, ( who was taught to fly by Wilbur Wright), was called out of retirement by Grumman to head a team building a replica of the comapany's first plane, for the company museum.

      It seems that the *art* of building such a plane had been lost and they needed an 'old timer' to come back and show them how it was done.

      If nothing else building replicas of older craft, ( of all kinds), can give a greater understanding of history than you can derive from a book.

      At it's best such activities may actually teach you things about history that had been, or were in danger of, being completely lost. Some of these things may, shock of shocks, still be important to know now, and perfectly applicable to entirely modern problems.

      KFG
  • A little OT I know, but I saw the episode of Scrapheap Challenge (British TV program where teams compete to build a specified project out of materials found on a scrapheap within 10 hours!) where they have to build a flying machine.

    One of the teams built something using a couple of old wings off a crashed plane, an aluminium ladder and some bits of expanded polystyrene (and sh*tloads of gaffa tape). The astounding thing is that they actually managed to get a few seconds flight from it using a tow launch system!

    My point (if I have one) is that it seems a little boring if everything gets over analysed before the first test flight. Of course it makes sense to make the machines moderately safe - correct the obvious glitches, build with higher tolerances etc etc. But don't forget that part of the Wright Brothers' pioneering spirit was a "suck it and see" mentality. They must have been both excited and scared on the first test flight. The pilot for the Scrapheap Challenge project *definitely* had the same spirit and it made his flights extremely exciting!
  • So, who was really the first? Looks like the Wrights came third... I put a poll here [planenews.com], cast your vote!

  • Unstable. (Score:3, Informative)

    by rew ( 6140 ) <r.e.wolff@BitWizard.nl> on Monday February 18, 2002 @12:22PM (#3026850) Homepage
    "The catch is: Each team wants its plane to fly more or less as the Wrights' did." The only problem with that is that as Orville Wright put it, their plane was "exceedingly erratic," so the recreators have made some slight concessions to safety.


    What Orville Wright calls erratic, is what we nowadays call "inherently unstable". You want to fly something that is inherently stable.

    There are a couple of ways to make a plane stable. Put a tail on it at the back (or move it back further if you already have one), or you can bend the wings backwards.

    Those are changes that people "see" from a distance, and people will say: "But that's not the plane that the Wrights flew in 1908! It's different."

    Oh, and you could change the profile of the wings, but then you have to have a plane that is almost stable to begin with, because this effect is so small. If carefully designed, you can build a "wing-only" plane (which was thought impossible because most wings are inherently unstable), like the helios (which as a matter of fact has its center of gravity well below the wing, one more trick to make a plane stable!).

    There are advantages to building an unstable aircraft. For the Wrights that was: "Oops never thought of that". Currently the excuse is that you can use computers to make the thing stable, and then you don't have to have the inefficient things like a "tail" on the plane...

    Roger.
  • This article failed to mention a pilot from Maine who has already successfully built a replica of multiple Wright Brother's planes, namely the 1910 EX, and have actually flown them across the country in preperation for the anniversary in 1903. My great-uncle, Dana Smith, is involved with this and has already demonstrated the viability of building a replica by methods that don't involve using the original design plans. The original plans purposely did not work because the brothers did not want people to imitate their creation. That, and changes were constantly being made and never kept up with.

    There is an article summary here titled: THE WRIGHT STUFF (second one down). Unfortunately, you have to pay to read the whole article. http://nl9.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_ac tion=list&p_topdoc=11 [newsbank.com]
  • As a Connecticut native, I can't let this one lie.

    Gustave Whitehead (Weiskopf) likely preceeded the Wrights, his planes have been rebuilt, and successfully flown as proof of concept.

    http://www.deepsky.com/~firstflight/Pages/resear ch .html

    Whitehead worked in Fairfield / Bridgeport Connecticut, but he had no pictures or movies like the Wrights had.

    There is plenty of evidence - in the form of printed reports and eyewitness accounts - that Whitehead achieved powered flight before the Wrights. There is however, a good reason why this claim isn't pursued on any official level - in the agreement that was drawn up to finally bring the battered Wright Flyer to the Smithsonian in 1948 you'll find this clause:

    "Neither the Smithsonian Institution or its successors, nor any museum or other agency, bureau or facilities administered for the United States of America by the Smithsonian Institution or its successors shall publish or permit to be displayed a statement or label in connection with or in respect of any aircraft model or design of earlier date than the Wright Airplane of 1903, claiming in effect that such aircraft was capable of carrying a man under its own power in controlled flight."

    In other words, say we weren't first, and we take our bat and ball and go home.

    If you were SI, you wouldn't touch Whitehead with a ten foot spar - why gamble on a re-creation when you have an original?

    OK - a battered original - darn thing BLEW OVER like a kite and wrecked while they were all busy whooping it up after the first three flights, went thru a mud flood, and generally sat around gathering dust for thirty plus years...

    Appropos today, a few more things everyone 'knows' and aren't really true - the cherry tree, silver dollar and wooden teeth yarns...

    http://www.mountvernon.org/books/myths.asp

    Enjoy
    • To be fair, the cherry tree, silver dollar, and wooden teeth are indeed merely yarns.

      The Wright Flyer is not.

      The agreement attached to the Wright Flyer has nothing to do with Whitehead, although it may have some effect any claims to be made in his behalf. For Decades the Smithsonian gave the honor of being first to fly to its own director, Langely. Langley's "plane" had no control surfaces, was launched off of a high platform, and "flew" from the top of the tower into the Potomac, killing its pilot.

      It was acrimony over this that made Wilbur refuse to give the Wright Flyer to the museum until they recognized the Wrights flew before Langely.

      Indeed, Langley's plane didn't so much as fly as *plummet.*

      KFG
  • The only catch is that these "slight concessions" include an array of the latest generation of gryroscopes, a bleeding edge NASA lase-guidance system, wich detects a half inch deviation of the course, and, of course, military grade GPS, airbags, brakes with ABS, fly-by-wire technology, redundant hydraulic system, and so on...

  • Dangerous, but what the heck? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Rogerborg ( 306625 ) on Monday February 18, 2002 @02:16PM (#3027504) Homepage

    As an aside, bear in mind that Scrapheap Challenge (the original UK name and format for Junkyard Wars) has already seen teams build and fly:

    Yes, that's right. If you haven't seen it, some poor mad fool got in a canard nosed "glider" that had been bodged up in day, and reached about 20mph and 15 feet before releasing the tow line. The "glider" went in a direction that could charitably be described as "not quite a plummet". He walked away. Then did it again, only faster. And again, reaching about 30mph. This is pretty much comparable with the speeds and energies in the Wright brother's creation.

    The remote plane was an interesting one. It actually flew, in a very nearly controlled fashion. OK, it was built with modern scrap, but it was scrap, and it was built in a day.

    I'm kind of wondering why the people building the replica airplanes feel the need to have human pilots in them. Remote control or even an expert system might do nicely if safety is a concern.

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