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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.

3 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.
  2. Re:Seems that they have forgotten one thing.... by mccalli · · Score: 5, Funny
    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

  3. Re:Were the Wrights first? by =Egon= · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.