Many Attempt to Recreate Wright Flight

Dec. 16, 2003 -- A hundred years ago, a telegram arrived in Dayton, Ohio, at the home of the Rev. Milton Wright.

"Success four flights thursday [sic] morning all against twenty one mile wind," it began. "longest 57 seconds inform Press home Christmas." It was signed with the misspelled name of Orville Wright.

It makes history's first airplane flight sound almost easy — as if the Wright Flyer had leapt into the air. But in fact, the Wrights crept forward. The first flight was only 120 feet, and the plane broke several struts when it landed.

A century later, the people re-enacting the first flight are finding the going just as hard.

"I thought I knew something about the Wright brothers when I started," said Ken Hyde, whose group, The Wright Experience, built the plane for the centennial celebration at Kitty Hawk. "When I got into it I realized that this story has never been told."

A Plane With Charisma

But that story — of the two brothers who conquered the sky — is so compelling, so uplifting, that at least two dozen other groups around the world have built their own Wright flyers.

"If an object can have charisma, this one certainly does," says Peter Jakab, Chairman of the Aeronautics Division of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, where the Wrights' plane is on display. "It's amazing how people really understand that they're standing just a few feet away from an object that really changed the world."

From California to Virginia, Indiana to India— enthusiasts have tried to recreate history.

Nick Engler is one of them. He lives in the Wrights' hometown of Dayton, where he formed the Wright Brothers Aeroplane Company to trace their steps.

"What better story is there?" he says. "What better invention is there to try to emulate, and try to share in that dream yourself?"

Engler likens his work to archaeology. He's piecing history together, since the Wrights, worried about competitors, never published the full plans for their first flyer.

"The Wrights," he laughs, "made this plane very difficult to reproduce."

And when different groups did it, they found the plane very hard to control. The original Wright Flyer may have been a work of genius, but it pitched violently up and down. Ken Hyde has found that his replica would only fly if its speed through the air was between 27 and 32 miles per hour.

Accuracy? Or Safety?

Enthusiasts had a decision to make: Would it be better to match the Wrights' plane as closely as possible — and risk accidents? Or should they modify the plane, deviating from history for safety's sake?

There were almost as many different approaches as there were replicas of the Wright Flyer:

A Chicago-area group, which calls itself Wright Redux, chose to copy history — and crashed, luckily without injuries.

Bufford Gross, an enthusiast from Peru, Ind., decided to modify his replica to make it more stable. But the plane has not flown so far.

Another group, from the Space Dynamics Laboratory at Utah State University, has already flown almost 300 times —but that is only possible because they modified the plane, building it with lightweight materials from NASA.

"Everybody else is designing museum pieces," said Prof. David Widauf of Utah State. "We wanted to design something for the future."

Finally, there was Nick Engler, who insisted on sticking to the Wrights' original design.

Last weekend, he and his group took the plane out to a large field near the Dayton airport. They put out a guide rail for takeoff, just as the Wrights did. They checked the wings and the controls, started up the engine, ran with the plane as the propellers pushed it forward, and got less than a foot into the air, for about a second, on the first try.

Engler said he was thrilled. And by the next day, the plane got airborne for about four seconds.

"We're sneaking up on flight," he said. "Everybody presumes that the Wright brothers just leapt into the air, and that's not quite what happened."

Engler calls the Wright Flyer a classic American story — two ordinary men, without much money, who used their wits to do something extraordinary.