The Wright Stuff

Tuesday marked the 116th anniversary of the Wright brother's historic flight of the 1903 Flyer at Kill Devil Hills, NC.  Commemorated on not one but TWO state license plates, it started the clock on a century that brought us six manned moon landings, the jumbo jet, supersonic passenger service, rovers on Mars and a permanent human presence in orbit.

Much can be said about the rate of change of this technology, or that it was largely achieved with little significant computational power.

Much can be said about its effect on the human race, our mobility, security, our audacity as explorers.

But every time I think of the Wright flyer, my main thought is about how peculiar it is.

It doesn't have an elevator in the rear.  Pitch control uses control surfaces in the front.

It doesn't have ailerons.  The wings flex to control roll.

The airfoils are thin.

The pilot lays prone.

You might argue these guys were the first, so there was no mold to break.  But that's not exactly true.  Sir George Cayley was sketching aircraft in the 'conventional' configuration a hundred years before, and the Wrights knew it.  Yet, they still did it their way.

And while the thin airfoil became a staple of bi-planes for the next decade, it wasn't long before the Fokker Dr.1 changed the game with its thick airfoil, defeating misconception and opening the hangar door to the era of the monoplane.  Nothing was carved in stone.  They did it their way.

For the next hundred years, aviation and innovation have gone hand in hand, because at every important moment somebody has been willing to say, "Let's try something new."  Or, perhaps more accurately, "We must."

Nothing is unassailable.  There are no sacred cows.  The best evidence of this is the Flyer itself.  After its trials at Kill Devil Hills, the aircraft, much of it broken, was crated up and stored back in Dayton, where it remained for 12 years.  The achievement was not a pinnacle to the Wrights: it was a step. An iteration.

The titanic forces that drive innovation in aerospace compel advancement.  For defense, those forces and constraints wrought massive production scale, materials development, payload, range, altitude, speed and stealth.  For transportation they also drove safety, fuel economy, durability, availability and operational efficiency ever upward.  

While these advancements are at times incremental, they are rarely timid.  As I write there are about one million people in flight.  In December 1903, there was one.

Thousands of airports now dot the surface of the earth.  In December 1903, there was one. 

The endeavors that may come to define our time: a private space race, electrification, urban mobility, sustainability and automation, are ambitious but achievable.  This industry provides some of the best evidence that what is conceivable is inevitable.

I'm reminded of that most when I admire the 1903 Wright Flyer.

Photo: The first public display of the Wright Flyer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1916. Copyright Smithsonian Institution.