December 17th 1903

[davzLSA]

Hi Guys, I wanted to mention something that most of us probably never think about on this 17th of December 2018. I think we all owe a debt of gratitude to Orville and Wilbur Wright for their contribution to aviation. I think they were the original amateur built experimenters. I think about them whenever I go out to my shop as they probably did. We as amateur builders have more in common with Orville and Wilbur than anyone else building aircraft. We are more fortunate than they were because of the information and help we have access too, thanks to the work of Orville and Wilbur. Please share your thoughts on the contribution of the Wright brothers to aviation. And just just take a minute to give a little thanks for what the Wrights left us.

[OhioLSA]

They were extraordinarily talented experimenters and craftsmen. After building a new glider each year from 1900-1902, they designed and built a new powered airplane each year: 1903, 1904 and 1905, including designing and building the engines. And propellers. Without electricity. (OK, they did have help from their hired hand, Charlie Taylor, with machining the engines.) Their only power tools were a lathe and a drill, driven from an overhead shaft powered by a single-cylinder gasoline engine.

[way_up_north]

They did something that is a lost art....they debated ideas...and argued.....sometimes so fiercely that they sometimes changed sides on each other inside the debates.....they solved many aeronautical mysteries that stumped that generation.....passion...something lost in our PC world....

some guy building a warp drive engine today in his backyard.....his how advanced they were for the time....thier only error was the wing warping...instead of ailerons....

they even vent build the first canard and beat Burt Rutan to it....

today....if they discovered flight ...it would be rushed to Area 51 and hushed up....

[Mark Goldberg]

While their accomplishment was tremendous - afterward they claimed a exclusive right to anything that flew afterward and tried to 100% stifle any competition. I read a book about Glen Curtis who was designing and flying planes at more or less the same time. That book shows a side of the Wright brothers most are not familiar with. I wasn't anyway. Mark

[davzLSA]

You know the interesting thing about that Mark was that it was the US government that settled the dispute because of WW1. They used antitrust law to settle it That is what lead to the Curtiss Wright company.

[JimParker256]

And if you lived in France or Brazil, you wouldn't hear that the Wright Brothers were the first to successfully fly a heavier-than-air craft at all. Many Europeans (notably the French) and 100% of the Brazilian population claim the brothers used a catapult-like system to launch the aircraft off a rail-type system, and that it could not have taken off on its own. They also claim the resulting crash landing disqualifies it as a "successful" flight... They also claim that the Wrights conducted their tests in a remote, unpopulated area precisely to cover up the fact that they were 'cheating' to get airborne.

Brazil and France (and much of Europe) credit Alberto Santos-Dumont (a Brazilian living in France) with the first successful heavier-than-air flight (unassisted takeoff, powered flight, and controlled landing). There are contemporary movies that show the successful flight of the 14-Bis of 722 ft, which was conducted in a public area, with thousands of observers. Over a hundred years later, they still hold firmly to that position, and that's what they teach in school.

To me, the real hero in the early history of aviation was Glenn Curtiss, who developed many of the structures, controls, and methodologies we still use today, all while fighting a fierce patent-infringement battle with the Wrights. And while the Wrights conducted all their experiments and test flights in secret (or as best they could maintain secrecy), Curtiss did his in full public view – successes and failures right out in the open.

And on another interesting side note about the Wright brothers, when my father-in-law (who was a pilot well before WW2, and retired as a Lieutenant Colonel from the Air Force) passed away a few years ago, we found his original private pilot logbook in his personal effects. Going through it, I found a flight with the signature "O. Wright" as the instructor, dated in the early 1930s. We got all excited, thinking the signature was Orville Wright himself (this was in Indiana, reasonably near to Dayton, Ohio, so it seemed plausible). And we knew Orville died in 1948, so the things got even more intriguing. However, after doing some further research, we learned that Orville gave up flying in the late 1920's, so the signature must be some other "O. Wright"... But we were pretty excited for a while there!

[svyolo]

Jim, I have heard both of those multiple times from French and Brazilian pilots I worked with. I even heard of another story, from an unnamed country on the wrong side of the equator. He even had a picture of the so called "first" powered airplane. I will try to find it on the internet and post it.

[davzLSA]

I think it was very ironic that as a result of all the law suits and other litigation that the Wrights pursued that in the end we had the Curtiss Wright company I think one of the most prolific engine and air frame builders in the early years From some of the accounts I have read about the Wrights flying it is mentioned that in 1912 when Wilbur went to France to demonstrate their flying machine ( because the US government was not interested at the time) that the crowds were amazed at the coordination of the flights ( the use of wing warping). It was the first time anyone other than the Wrights had seen this type of flight. I believe up until then that most flights were straight ahead with a landing straight ahead. I think the Wright really understood the mechanics of flight on a deeper level than most at the time I believe this could be attributed to the fact that they used the scientific method to discover the secrets of flight And the real genius was that they were able to incorporate this knowledge into a machine. They studied everything they could find from their contemporaries and found that some of the established knowledge at the time was wrong and that is what pushed them into experimentation to obtain the empirical data they used to build their machines, I agree that if they had been more open and less litigious about their research that the science of flight would have been much further along much sooner. Jim that would have been a family er-loom if it were signed by Orville!!!

[whee]

There is a pretty good documentary on Netflix that talks about the early days of aviation. It’s really cool stuff and paints a different picture than an American History class. The Wright brothers did some really cool stuff but so did Glenn Curtis.

[davzLSA]

HI Guys I was in Montgomery today to visit my sons and granddaughters and we went to a new park that was recently built. There was a tribute to the Wright brothers about the first flight school they opened there in 1910. There was an interesting monument there I wanted to show you guys.So here are the pictures.

[way_up_north]

Wow... what a great monument. ....I’m from Canada....is this Alabama/Montgomery?

[davzLSA]

yes it is Montgomery Alabama