Slipping the surly bonds: the Wright brothers weren't the first to dream of powered flight. But, they were the first to put all the pieces together and achieve the dream

Airman, Dec, 2002 by Tech. Sgt. Mark Kinkade

It wasn't much of a flight -- just 12 seconds and little more than 120 feet over the white sand of Kill Devil Hill at Kitty Hawk, N.C.

But those 12 seconds changed the world and linked the brothers flying the wood-framed, muslin-covered aircraft -- powered by a motor no larger than the average lawnmower engine -- forever to the birth of powered flight.

When Orville and Wilbur Wright got their flyer airborne Dec. 17, 1903, they beat a small but aggressive community of experts, designers and engineers to the sky.

While others were concocting often-bizarre and consistently faulty designs for powered aircraft, or noodling whether powered or glider flight would be best, it was a pair of bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, who combined a lifetime passion for flight with the lessons learned by other aviation pioneers to produce those 12 seconds over the Kitty Hawk dunes.

The brothers' inspirations

Aviation legend Scott Crossfield gets a little upset at the suggestion that the Wright brothers were something less than aviation geniuses.

"They weren't just bicycle builders," the former test pilot growled. "They were very ingenious guys, artists with wood. They were self-educated engineers very knowledgeable in what they were doing."

Crossfield, the first man to fly at twice the speed of sound, is training pilots to fly a reproduction of the Wright flyer that made the first powered flight. He said the brothers weren't the first to conceive of powered flight, but they had the ingenuity to pull it off.

"Other people were onto the same ideas, the same concepts, but they obviously didn't have the ingenuity of the Wright brothers," he said.

The Wright brothers' interest in aeronautics paralleled the growth of experimentation in the field. In 1878, the boys were riveted by a toy helicopter their father gave them. The toy was designed by a French engineer to test aerodynamics theories.

Years later, they began making their own versions of the cork, bamboo and rubber-band contraptions, each larger than the preceding version.

"We did not know that a machine having twice the linear dimensions of another would require eight times the power," Wilbur wrote shortly after the Kitty Hawk flight. "We finally became discouraged and returned to kite flying, a sport to which we had devoted so much attention that we were regarded as experts."

In Germany, Otto Lilienthal, another engineer, was experimenting with glider aircraft. Over the years, the Wright brothers read Lilienthal's writings and pondered his findings on aerodynamics. In 1896 Lilienthal died in a glider accident.

Public interest in aviation was, at best, tepid. If the public was enthralled by the promise of air travel, the interest seemed limited to balloons and other lighter-than-air vehicles.

But there were researchers, experts and hobbyists trying to take to the sky in something other than a balloon. An air race was underway.

"For 100 years, people had been trying to come up with concepts for powered flight," said Ken Hyde, director of The Wright Experience, an organization devoted to recreating the Wright brothers' experiments, aircraft and findings. "But a lot of the activity wasn't doing much. The science wasn't advancing. [The Wright brothers] really advanced the science with their methods and findings."

The brothers never went to college. Instead, they developed their knowledge through research and constant questions. Hyde said their chief "mentor" was Octave Chanute, a bridge designer who devoted much of his time to the problem of flight.

But the Wrights weren't typical students. They didn't repeat mistakes others had made, Hyde said. Instead, they would see where something went wrong and choose to simply not make that mistake.

"They didn't copy other people," Hyde said. "They took a fresh look at it and a fresh step back. They were able to step-by-step build up, get experience and go above what had already been done."

When the Wrights started testing wing designs with gliders in the late 1890s, they wrote Chanute as many as three times a week. As they advanced their designs and sent the results to the engineer, he eventually started writing them with questions instead of answers.

They were also keeping an eye on the activities of Samuel Langley. Commissioned by the U.S. government to create a powered aircraft, Langley spent a fortune developing airframes and engines.

Again, the Wrights corresponded with Langley, picked his brain, and put the information to work in their designs. They didn't have the financial backing he had, but they were still moving ahead. As Langley's designs crashed into the Potomac river, the Wrights were flying gliders farther and faster than anyone else.

Wind tunnels and propellers

The Wrights took a huge lead over their competition by focusing attention on one component of powered flight: the propeller.

"The first powered flight is what they are remembered for," Hyde said, "but the propeller is where they were really ahead of the game. That's where the genius part comes in."