The 1902 glider, on top, had a wing span of 32 feet, 1 inch, and weighed 112 pounds. However, it was still difficult to control, despite the fact that the Wrights used this glider to break a number of distance records. They built this hoping that they had solved the lift problems with a forward elevator meant to control pitch. The middle aircraft is their 1901 glider, which had a wing span of 22 feet and weighed 98 pounds. The glider did prove that their basic design was air-worthy, but they had difficulty getting it aloft with the weight of a pilot in normal winds. They made their first flight using this aircraft, which was made from wood and cotton sateen fabric. The one of the bottom is a model of the Wrights' 1900 glider, which had a wing span of 17 feet. On display at the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historic Park are these three models of the Wrights' early gliders. The plane would be thrust down the rail and it would vault into the air when it hit the right speed. This is a replica of the catapult they installed at Huffman Prairie. That meant that in order to get the planes in the air, they needed to catapult them. It was here that the Wrights conducted their 39-minute flight that convinced them they were ready to patent their work and get their airplane business of the ground.Īlthough the Wrights had long experience with bicycles, they somehow hadn't originally come up with the idea of putting wheels on their planes. There, the Wrights conducted countless tests of their various planes, and even set up a flying school there. This formed the basis of the Wright Company, their airplane business, which made them rich, unlike their previous printing and bicycle businesses.Īlthough the Wrights made their first flight in secrecy at Kitty Hawk, N.C., as they progressed in perfecting the airplane, they needed to be able to do much more frequent testing back home in Dayton as well.Īs a result, they chose a cow pasture in a flood plain on the edge of town now known as the Huffman Prairie Flying Field. And that meant, primarily, that they could seek out a contract with the U.S. The main reason this plane may be more important to aviation history is that, because the Wrights used it to demonstrate that they'd solved most of the technical problems they'd been working on for years, they were now able to market the machine. Today, the plane, which on October 5, 1905, made a 24-mile, 39-minute flight - more than all other flights made by anyone up to that time combined - is permanently housed in the Wright brothers exhibit at the Carillon Historical Park Museum. That man, Gustave Whitehead, is said to have first flown an airplane in 1901.Īlthough the original Wright Flyer gets most of the ink - and why not, given that it made the first-ever manned, powered flight, which was captured in a perfect photograph - some would say that the brothers' Wright Flyer III, which they used to perfect their airplane design, is more important in the annals of aviation. But as bicycle makers, the Wrights knew there was another axis, and knew that rolling the plane was key to maintaining flight.Īlthough the Wrights are generally acknowledged as the inventors of the airplane, there is another inventor whose work has been gaining supporters, especially in Connecticut. Until that point, most people trying to get a powered aircraft to fly had only been thinking about up/down and left/right. While the Wrights were competing with a number of other would-be inventors of the airplane, the brothers were the first to come up with the eventual winning combination of innovations - figuring out how to achieve lift and drag how to deliver thrust to the machine and most important, the use of three-axis control. The Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historic Park has a replica of the aircraft. The original Wright Flyer, with which the Wright brothers made the world's first airplane flight on December 17, 1903, is permanently housed at the Smithsonian's Air & Space Museum in Washington, D.C.
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