Re-Building the Wright Flyer

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.

Comments

Exceedingly Erratic == Unsafe

[Coz]

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.

Re:Exceedingly Erratic == Unsafe

[thogard]

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.

Re:Seems that they have forgotten one thing....

[mccalli]

The fact is, that the Wright flyer only flew 12 seconds on that first flight, and I'm sure it didn't do it very quickly...

Err...surely it did it in twelve seconds?

Cheers,
Ian

Re:What reminds me..

[ipxodi]

You're comparing apples and oranges -- The Wright brothers made the first powered flight WITHOUT a "lighter-than-air" technology. Previously all succesful flights had been made using ballons, dirigibles, etc.

Re:What reminds me..

[lotrfan]

At least what they said. No one have a single proff of it besides their word. I'm not saying they didn't it, but scientifically speaking, it was not audited and could not be reproductible so it's not science, it's speculation. Santos Dumont flight was seen by hundreds of people, have photographs, film and so on, was reproduced lots of times and was the real base for the comercial aviation as we all know. I agree that other technologies came first (balloons, dirigibles, etc), but Santos Dumont was the real thing to be consistently called a powered flying machine. But they all add their insights to the work of one man, Leonardo da Vinci, the real genius behind lots of our inventions: Parachute, Helicopter, Delta Wing, etc.

Re:Were the Wrights first?

[=Egon=]

No, they werent.

Santos Dumont was the first to accomplish a full flight. It took off alone and it landed. The wrights only got some seconds in the air, and this because they were thrown with the help of a machine
You may check that with any history teacher.
But why some people (eg. the americans) dont give him the credits is a whole other story.