Wright Way Wasn't Easy, The

Flight Journal, Dec 2004 by Davisson, Budd

WHEN READING JIM OBEEG'S ARTICLE ON flying the lunar module ("To the Moon and Back/' page 34), it brought to mind last year's rash of Wright Flyer replicas: they clearly showed us that the Wrights knew something about flying that we don't know.

When NASA pilots strapped on the first lunar module (LM) for initial testing, it could easily be said that they were learning to fly all over again. Here was a vehicle without wings, designed to fly in zero atmosphere and low gravity. Yet, for the most part, the test pilots had very little trouble flying an aircraft that, for all intents and purposes, was balanced on the head of a pin-represented by the column of thrust from the rocket motors. You'd think that if they got a little imbalanced, they would wobble off that pinhead and flop down like a wounded Frisbee. But they didn't have those problems. Why?

First, the pilots who transitioned to the LM had been flying for decades. They already had the eye/hand coordination, the mental understanding and awareness that come with years of flying high-performance aircraft.

Now, think about the Wright boys: they were self-taught pilots who knew only what they had discovered via their own experiments. There was no simulator (as there was with the LM), and they had only the momentary flight experience gained in their own gliders. Yet they managed to urge their Flyer off the ground and sustain flight. After 1903 and into 1905, they did this repeatedly.

Let's go back to 2003 and the various Wright 1903 replicas and the notable lack of success the pilots had with these airplanes. Without exception, those who tried to fly the as-per-the-original 1903 Flyers were trained, licensed pilots. Some were even military pilots. Were they successful? Not by a long shot.

In ne'.rly every recent attempt at flying 1903 Wright airplanes that truly replicated the originals, the airplanes flew the pilots-not the other way around. Men with years of flying experience in everything from Piper Cubs to jets could barely cope with the total lack of stability, the general weirdness of the designs and the appalling lack of power. Yet the Wrights made it happen. Even with today's computers and all our from-the-bottom-of-the-ocean-to-the-moon experience, modern pilots were still universally humbled by the replicas of those original spidery contraptions.

The control reactions of most modern pilots are based on experience gained in "normal"-handling airplanes. The Wrights, however, had developed their own definition of "normal," and their "normal" included having to fight the airplane every inch of the way. Movies of the later Wright airplanes show the canard to be constantly "hunting," as the pilot continually works the elevator to supply the stability that the airplanes lacked. The Wright boys had become their own onboard stability-augmentation system.

After a century of flight, we can congratulate ourselves on some stellar achievements, but let's not think that we're better pilots than the Wrights were, '!'he real progress in flight has been that airplanes have been improved to the point where it takes only a few hours of training before the man in the street can safely fly a plane. It has often been said that the Wrights' real contribution to history was proving it could be done, but no one can claim that they proved it could be done easily.

Budd Davisson, Editor-in-Chief