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Re-Building the Wright Flyer

Posted by timothy on 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.

2 of 175 comments (clear)

  1. Exceedingly Erratic == Unsafe by Coz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    I love vegetarians - some of my favorite foods are vegetarians.
    1. Re:Exceedingly Erratic == Unsafe by thogard · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I've been reading rec.aviation.student 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.