Farced Flight?
by Andy Turudic
On December 17, 2003, America took a brief pause from its daily routine to mark its achievement, contributions, and to assert its leadership, in the field of aviation. The USA has, for the past 100 years, claimed to have been the first to achieve sustained flight of the combination of a powered, controlled, man carrying, heavier than air contraption, with the innovation being entirely embodied in the "ingenuity" of two brothers from Dayton, OH. Portions of these combinations of flight criteria muddy the history books and press as firsts by the Wrights; portions far from the truth and far from being American in origin.
The Wright Brothers probably could not have gotten luckier at Kitty Hawk in their first attempt of the day on December 17, 1903, when the stubborn resolve of man combined forces with the rare graces of mother nature and father fate to elevate a 750 pound man and machine, engine running, for about the length of an Airbus 319 passenger jet, and then for 859 ft. in its fourth and final attempt. As part of the century of flight celebrations at Kitty Hawk, in 12 knot, gusting 16 mph winds, the culmination of efforts from NASA's full scale wind tunnel work, the technology and tuning to get 33% more power out of the engine than the original using Ford's engine dynamometers, and a substantially extended 200 ft. "runway", could not get a faithful Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) reproduction of the Wright 1903 Flyer off the ground; a failure that overshadowed the marking of the centennial itself in the headlines of the worldwide press, perhaps extending our recent lack of credibility into our history.
Were the Wrights better pilots and engineers than what the best minds of NASA, and pilots trained under renowned test pilot Scott Crossfield, could muster in 2003? Like any engineering program that failed to deliver to its aggressive promises of performance and schedule, and where cancellation was not an option, did the Wrights' project get thrown to the marketing wolves and business strategists to buy time and stretch truth in the face of up-and-coming, formidable, competition? What motivates engineers, initially pure of heart, intent, and purpose, to morph into deceptive and secretive monsters?
The Wrights' initial exposure to flying came about in their youth when their father brought a rubber band powered, helicopter-like, heavier than air toy home from a business trip. The curious brothers became adept at copying the toy and tried to scale it up in size, only to be stung, unbeknownst to them, by the physical principle that mass goes up with the cube of scale while propulsion was a square law relation. After a combination of home schooling and bits of high school, the Wright Brothers established five successful bicycle shops in Dayton in the 1890s, amassing about a dozen times the prevailing annual wage in savings. An 1896 newspaper account of the death of glider pioneer Otto Lilienthal rekindled Wilbur's interest in building a large flying machine. As in modern day hang gliders, Lilienthal's machines used weight shifting for controlled flight; he apparently could not shift his weight quick enough to avoid entering a deadly spin from about 50 ft. up. The Wrights read all of the available literature on flight, performed experiments, and eventually sought a literature survey from the Smithsonian on May 30, 1899 to see how Samuel Langley, its Director, was doing. Of particular interest are the Smithsonian's referral to the 1895, 1896 and 1897 issues of Aeronautical Annual, and the Progress in Flying Machines by Octave Chanute, which were not subsequently ordered by Wilbur, since he had already read them. From these materials, the Wrights formed a basis of understanding of the state of knowledge among their peers and performed experiments to verify published data and assumptions.
Lore has it that Wilbur Wright was flexing a bicycle tube box (similar to the open ended box a modern day light bulb comes in) while speaking to a customer and came up with the idea of warping wings by squeezing on the diagonal corner of one end, and simultaneously the opposite diagonal corner of the other end, of the box. If this is a difficult to understand description, the Wrights' lawyer had an equally difficult time in the March 1903 patent application and was either really dumb or extremely clever, since the Wrights' patent claims were amended all the way through 1906, the year the patent was awarded, and were broadened to encompass ailerons which was not, in any sense of the imagination, modeled or intended by flexing a box.
The Wrights carefully followed the suggestions in publications for experimental methods, methods of calculations, and used tables of measured data, culminating in a wing warping kite flown in August of 1899. Actual wing deflection at the tips appears not to have been a new concept and was patented by coinventors Chanute, a retired railroad bridge design engineer who built gliders and compiled and wrote about flying machines, and Mouillard whose works the Wrights admitted knowing, but curiously never cited as prior art in their application. Wilbur later dismissed the Mouillard patent in court by arguing the lack of understanding of the underlying phenomenon, rather than the fact that twisting a wingtip really does cause a bird or plane to tilt or bank, that is to say, turn. This was in contradiction to Chanute's testimony that he had granted an exclusive license to the Wrights to use the wing warping control patent of his deceased partner.
The rather interesting relationship between Chanute and the Wrights began with a letter in May of 1900 in which Wilbur Wright openly discloses his concept of warping wings to a perfect stranger and a known writer without establishing confidence, admits having read the Aeronautical Annuals cited by the Smithsonian and the book by Chanute, and makes this statement of character and intent to Chanute:
"I make no secret of my plans for the reason that I believe no financial profit will accrue to the inventor of the first flying machine, and that only those who are willing to give as well as to receive suggestions can hope to link their names with the honor of its discovery. The problem is too great for one man alone and unaided to solve in secret."
Wilbur was, for all intents and purposes, an engineer willing to collaborate, share, and increase the knowledge of mankind. Chanute served as an unpaid consultant to the Wrights for about a decade, but there seems to be more than a consultant sort of relationship. Conspiracy theorists could say that Chanute worked for the US War Department, with frequent trips made to Washington, and made it his business to gather intelligence on flying efforts around the globe. Chanute seems to be the guiding light behind all of the Wrights' actions and decisions, especially in engineering and materials, over the next few years, with correspondence between Chanute and Wilbur occurring very regularly. History has lost what arrangements and conversations could have been made in face-to-face meetings, but clearly in reading the correspondence, it was Chanute who was the master puppeteer for the Wright flight program.
On October 22, 1900 the Wrights made their first manned glider flights from an 105 ft. high sand dune near Kitty Hawk, NC using the wing warping mechanism of squeezing the diagonals on a biplane wing. Being successful in proving their wing warp mechanism worked, they constructed two gliders over the next two years that were large enough to carry a man. These they flew at a place called Jockey's Ridge, near Kitty Hawk, which to this day has sand dunes with an elevation of over one hundred feet and high sustained winds in the late portion of the year. Their 1902 man-carrying glider formed the basis of a gasoline-engine powered machine they were to attempt to fly the following year and partly served as a flight trainer for a portion of close to 2000 glides. The Wrights, upon receiving several nagging letters from Chanute, filed a patent on their wing warping mechanism in March of 1903, intended for the purpose of establishing their prior art. Whether there is perjury in the filing or not is left to lawyer readers, since the "invention" was fully disclosed, without confidentiality, to the blabbermouth Chanute in May 1900.
Though the Wrights asked for bids on an engine that was about 20% of the weight of most engines of their day, and though they received a bid for an engine that met their needs, they decided to build their own (most likely out of frugality), within a maximum weight specification of 200 pounds and with a minimum calculated horsepower rating of 8 hp to sustain level flight. Charles Taylor, their machinist at the cycle shop, helped design and build an aluminum/copper alloy-block engine for them, which produced 12 hp and was incorporated into a variant of their 1902 glider for late 1903 flight testing. This "Flyer" was set up on a dune at Kitty Hawk in December of 1903, and despite a 9 degree inclination of the launching track on one of the dunes, the powered Flyer could only achieve a negative 4 degree flight path from the horizon. A rock with propellers on it. The 1903 Wright Flyer could not fly level, despite a downhill launch and full power. The math on a 750 pound machine declining 4 degrees, dropping 7 ft. in 12 s, using a 75% efficiency propeller, yields 750*7/12/550/0.75 = ~1 hp shy of level flight with the very large assumption that drag and other parasitic losses stay constant. A competitor, Samuel Langley, Director of the Smithsonian, had built an aircraft engine of similar weight that produced 52 hp, almost enough for the Wright Flyer to do a ballistic climbout! Langley, though successful with flying model planes with engines as early as 1896, failed in the aeronautics and structures of a man carrying sized machine; the Wrights' largest failure was in engines. This was America's largest failing for a first flight effort.
As luck would have it, the temperature at Kitty Hawk was in the 40s and winds on December 17, 1903 picked up to 21-27 mph, with substantial gusting, at which time the Brothers decided to launch the Flyer from level ground, recording the fact that the speed from a downhill launch was too high for them to run alongside the Flyer a few days beforehand. This is somewhat curious in that the airspeed (running speed plus a 21 mph wind) would have been high enough to where the wing warping may have sufficed. The level launch is the famous first flight of "approximately one hundred feet" in the Wrights' notes, which in history somehow became 112 ft., or even 120 ft. as reported almost everywhere last week. Maybe at the bicentennial of flight, the popular media will make it 200 ft.
It is unknown if the Flyer was actually pushed into the air by the seven men that were present since the wind-speed plus a running speed would be about the Flyer's recorded airspeed and a launch from about 5 ft. up would give a glide to about 100 or so ft. Mathematically, a launch down a dune from 50 ft. or so up could account for the fourth flight being 859 ft. in length. The 2003 replica Flyer did fly a little over 100 ft. using a 16 hp "tuned" engine in November 2003, as did a 20 hp lawnmower-engined replica from Wright Redux, so the 12 hp 1903 machine was most definitely underpowered. So how did it fly in 1903 if we barely got their shortest distance using 33% more power in 2003 and all contemporary pilots know that rate of climb is according to power setting of the engine? Given that the Wrights' father was a Bishop, let's assume the Brothers, and the federal lifeguards enlisted to carry the machine, did not conspire to throw the Flyer into the air, or launch it down a hill, and then use staged photography.
An important consideration, despite a fairly low angle of attack when sitting on the ground, was that a wind gust was sufficient to overturn the 605 pound Flyer while sitting on the ground after its fourth flight, causing substantial damage to the airframe and breaking the mounting legs of the engine which was scrapped at the site, eliminating any record of its construction or power output. Given the substantial wind in 1903 and the observation from the re-enactment flight in December 2003 that the Flyer was capable of lifting its canard (front elevator or wing) easily at the end of the track to produce a decent angle of attack on the main biplane wings (about 15 degrees on most airfoils for maximum lift), it was very likely that a wind gust of, say 5 mph (about 400 pounds of gust-induced lift is produced at maximum AOA and a baseline windspeed of 21 mph), picked the Flyer up about 7 ft. and then it glided, engine running, at the 4 degree average declination to produce a flight length of about 100 ft. Over that 12 s period it's conceivable that additional gusts could "pump" potential energy into the Flyer at a slight expense of forward speed. Since it weighed about 750 pounds, the Flyer's inertia could sustain forward motion if the gusts were brief, but the amount of force with a slight wind change of, say 8 mph was substantial enough to accelerate the Flyer vertically at 1g. A gust of less than 2 s could lift the Flyer more than 50 ft. and produce a glide of 800 ft. or so.
So yes, the engine was running, the man was on the machine, it rose into the air, and it flew in an apparent straight line as if there was no control. To quote Chanute in his own gliding tests years earlier:
"On many occasions the machine and man were raised higher than the starting point by increasing wind velocity, but this action was found to be much too irregular to be availed of as a source of power."
So, why not fix the engine problem by sharing the effort with Langley, who already blew $50,000 of War Department money building great engines and unsuccessful airframes?
A letter from Chanute in January 1902 makes the Wrights aware of an aerial navigation prize in the works that is sponsored by the St. Louis World's Fair people, allocating $200,000 in prizes. All of a sudden a hobby where "no financial profit will accrue to the inventor of the first flying machine" becomes a venture with 500 times the prevailing annual wage at stake -- the equivalent of today's X-prize (why is it always St. Louis with these prizes?) of $10 M. The Wrights immediately retain a patent attorney and start the patent filing process, culminating in their first filing in March of 1903. During the "bicycle season" Wilbur works a lawsuit on behalf of his father. This is the "family business" and "distractions" he mentions in his letters to Chanute. The Wrights go completely secret and nobody believes them when they come out of the woodwork stating they have flown at an earlier date. The Wrights probably knew that they would need to continually innovate to stay ahead of competitors, but somehow got derailed believing they could live from the 20% royalties from a patent on a very expensive machine or collect on a pretty tidy sum for performing to the World's fair criteria for flight.
So what exactly did the Wright Brothers invent, particularly as claimed in recent media coverage?
The wind tunnel? Nope, in existence for at least 30 years prior.
Heavier than air flight? Nope, Cayley did that in 1796
Propellers as rotating wings? Nope, Cayley.
Powered flight? Nope, again Cayley and later, Penaud.
Powered heavier than air over a good distance? Nope, Langley in 1896.
Controlled man carrying airplane? Nope, Lilienthal.
Wing warping? Nope, Mouillard in a US patent issued in 1897.
Biplane glider? Nope, Herring and Chanute do it in an article in the Annuals of 1897 with a photo of the machine. In fact, Wilbur's box warping likely made the connection with Chanute's photograph. Chanute was the first to use a Pratt truss (railroad bridge) as a structural basis for his own, as well as the Wright's machines.
Automatically coordinating rudder in turns? Nope, Chanute.
Curved wings? Nope, Lilienthal again.
Squashing a box? Yes.
So, the 1903 flights may have been a dismal failure -- nothing but a manned glider with an engine running. The Wrights built a new, heavier plane in 1904 with a larger engine, and used a weight driven catapult to launch it from the ground in Ohio. It took dozens of flights to get back in the air again. It was not until October of 1904 that they could fly in a circle. The way I see it, we still have another 10 months until the real centennial of the first controlled, powered, heavier than air, man-carrying sustained flight by the Wrights. Maybe by then, EAA can build a real flying replica of the 1904 Flyer and the US Government can explain how it was the Supreme Court and lawyers that determined who invented the airplane through myriad lawsuits by the Wrights, not the actual invention itself. Maybe someone in the press can say, even in one sentence, that the Wrights were not part of a private sector interested in building better planes and that they just wanted to put their feet up and collect the St. Louis prize or the 20% royalties no-one was willing to pay for a wing warping principle that does not even survive Darwinism. The Wrights were way off base on their seasonal business aspirations, yet so close -- they should have ripped the wings off their Flyer, creating a new mode of transportation and source of winter income by doing so.
I suppose that electrical engineers should be grateful that nobody in
St. Louis is willing to offer $10 M for the first atto-volt offset operational
amplifier. The concepts of having an entire industry tripping over itself
towards one solitary and narrow goal, having visions of living from one
product and abandoning any further product enhancements or innovations,
should be left to Venture Capitalists and are a minefield for any technologist
with an untainted heart.
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