WRIGHT BROTHERS & WRIGHT FLYERS, MAKING HISTORY

Contemplating planes in El Remolar-Les Filipines

Today, The Grandma has gone to visit El Remolar i Les Filipines. It is an amazing natural zone next to the Barcelona Airport. The Grandma likes visit this places because she loves birds and this is an important natural reserve where you can contemplate them.

The pond of Remolar and the marshes of the Filipines constitute one of the main wetlands of the Delta del Llobregat. Formerly part of this wetland was part of the sector known as Pas de les Vaques, destroyed as a consequence of the expansion works at El Prat airport. The Remolar pond dates back to the 11th century and was an old mouth or throat of the Llobregat river. 

More information: Delta del Llobregat

El Braç de Vidala, also located within this space, is an arm of the lake of the Remolar, that already appears in some maps of century XIX and that was extended, between years 50 and 60, by means of the emptying of terrain Nowadays, this new arm is completely naturalized, but its state of conservation suffers from the eutrophicated water inlet, from irrigation systems.

Its situation next to the airport allows The Grandma to see the great quantity of planes that every day land on and off Barcelona. She has remembered the origins of flying with the Wright brothers and their important apportation to our human progress. She has also remembered that on a day like today in 1905, the Wright brothers piloted the Wright Flyer III in a new world record flight of 24 miles in 39 minutes.

The Wright brothers -Orville (August 19, 1871-January 30, 1948) and Wilbur (April 16, 1867-May 30, 1912) -were two American aviation pioneers generally credited with inventing, building, and flying the world's first successful airplane. They made the first controlled, sustained flight of a powered, heavier-than-air aircraft with the Wright Flyer on December 17, 1903, four miles south of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

More information: Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum

In 1904–05, the brothers developed their flying machine into the first practical fixed-wing aircraft, the Wright Flyer III. Although not the first to build experimental aircraft, the Wright brothers were the first to invent aircraft controls that made fixed-wing powered flight possible.

The brothers' breakthrough was their creation of a three-axis control system, which enabled the pilot to steer the aircraft effectively and to maintain its equilibrium. This method remains standard on fixed-wing aircraft of all kinds. From the beginning of their aeronautical work, the Wright brothers focused on developing a reliable method of pilot control as the key to solving the flying problem.

The Wright Brothers

This approach differed significantly from other experimenters of the time who put more emphasis on developing powerful engines.

Using a small homebuilt wind tunnel, the Wrights also collected more accurate data than any before, enabling them to design more efficient wings and propellers. Their first U.S. patent did not claim invention of a flying machine, but a system of aerodynamic control that manipulated a flying machine's surfaces. The brothers gained the mechanical skills essential to their success by working for years in their Dayton, Ohio-based shop with printing presses, bicycles, motors, and other machinery. Their work with bicycles in particular influenced their belief that an unstable vehicle such as a flying machine could be controlled and balanced with practice.

More information: National Park Service I & II

From 1900 until their first powered flights in late 1903, they conducted extensive glider tests that also developed their skills as pilots. Their shop employee Charlie Taylor became an important part of the team, building their first airplane engine in close collaboration with the brothers.

The Wright brothers' status as inventors of the airplane has been subject to counter-claims by various parties. Much controversy persists over the many competing claims of early aviators. Edward Roach, historian for the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park, argues that they were excellent self-taught engineers who could run a small company, but they did not have the business skills or temperament to dominate the growing aviation industry.

The Wright Flyer III was the third powered aircraft by the Wright Brothers, built during the winter of 1904-05. Orville Wright made the first flight with it on June 23, 1905. The Flyer III had an airframe of spruce construction with a wing camber of 1-in-20 as used in 1903, rather than the less effective 1-in-25 used in 1904. The new machine was equipped with the engine and other hardware from the scrapped Flyer II and -after major modifications- achieved much greater performance than Flyers I and II.

More information: Space

As initially built, the Flyer III looked almost the same as its predecessors and offered equally marginal performance. Orville suffered minor injuries in a serious nose-dive crash in the machine on July 14, 1905.

When rebuilding the airplane, the Wrights made important design changes that solved the stability problems of the earlier models. They almost doubled the size of the elevator and rudder and moved them about twice the distance from the wings. They added two fixed half-moon shaped vertical vanes called blinkers between the elevators but later removed and widened the skid-undercarriage which helped give the wings a very slight dihedral.

The Wright Flyer III

They disconnected the rudder of the rebuilt Flyer III from the wing-warping control, and as in most future aircraft, placed it on a separate control handle. They also installed a larger fuel tank and mounted two radiators on front and back struts for extra coolant to the engine for the anticipated lengthy duration flights.

When testing of Flyer III resumed in September, improvement was obvious. The pitch instability that had hampered Flyers I and II was brought under control. Crashes, some of which had been severe, no longer occurred. Flights with the redesigned aircraft started lasting over 20 minutes. The Flyer III became practical and dependable, flying reliably for significant durations and bringing its pilot back to the starting point safely and landing without damage.

On October 5, 1905 Wilbur made a circling flight of 38.9 km in 39 minutes 23 seconds, over Huffman Prairie, longer than the total duration of all the flights of 1903 and 1904. Four days later, they wrote to the United States Secretary of War William Howard Taft, offering to sell the world's first practical fixed-wing aircraft.

To keep their knowledge from falling into competitors' hands, the Wrights stopped flying and disassembled the airplane on November 7, 1905. Two and a half years later, having won American and French contracts to sell their airplane, they refurbished the Flyer with seats for a pilot and passenger, equipped it with upright control levers and installed one of their new 35-horsepower in-line vertical engines. They shipped it to North Carolina and made practice flights near Kill Devil Hills from May 6 to 14, 1908 to test the new controls and the Flyer's passenger-carrying abilities.

More information: Time

On May 14, 1908, Wilbur flew mechanic Charles Furnas (1880–1941) 600 m in 29 seconds, making him the first airplane passenger. The same day, Orville also flew with Furnas, this time 2,125 feet 48 m in 4 minutes 2 seconds. Orville's flight with Furnas was seen by newspaper reporters hiding among the sand dunes; they mistakenly thought Wilbur and Orville were flying together. He is one of the few people to fly with both Wright brothers their sister Katharine being another.

Later that day, Wilbur was flying solo when he moved one of the new control levers the wrong way and crashed into the sand, suffering bruises. The Flyer's front elevator was wrecked and the practice flights ended. Due to deadlines for their upcoming public demonstration flights in France and Virginia, the Wrights did not repair the airplane and it never flew again.

The Wright Brothers

The Wright Flyer III was left in its damaged condition in the North Carolina hangar. In 1911 the Berkshire Museum of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, through one Zenas Crane, obtained most of the components from both the abandoned Flyer and the 1911 Wright glider, but never assembled or exhibited them.

The parts of the 1905 aircraft remained in Massachusetts for almost forty years, until Orville requested their return in 1946 for the Flyer's restoration as a central exhibit at Edward A. Deeds' Carillon Park in Dayton, Ohio. Some Kitty Hawk residents also possessed pieces of the 1905 airplane; Deeds and Orville also obtained many of these for the restoration.

At the end of the 1947–1950 restoration process, craftsmen estimated that the 1905 aircraft retained between 60 and 85% of its original material. The 1905 airplane is now displayed in the Wright Brothers Aviation Center at Carillon Historical Park.

More information: Mental Floss

The aircraft and display are part of the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park. The restored 1905 Wright Flyer III is the only fixed-wing aircraft to be designated a National Historic Landmark.

A historic missing piece of the Flyer III, thought to be a piece of Flyer I, turned up in 2010 in the hands of Palmer Wood, whose uncle, Thomas, had given him the piece in the 1960s. Wood took the piece to Brian Coughlin, an aircraft collector, who, not knowing what the piece was, took it to Peter Jakab of the Smithsonian Institution. The missing piece is the actuator, which connects the moment chain or arm the Wrights still used chain link in 1905 to the front elevator.

In the 1940s Orville gathered all of the stray pieces of the Flyer that were not in Massachusetts from Kitty Hawk locals who, as children, raided the Wrights' 1908 hangar for souvenirs. The actuator piece, which more than likely broke away in Wilbur's sand dune crash of May 14, 1908, somehow missed Orville's gathering efforts and was replaced with a solid or flanged piece which the Wrights did not start using until 1908.

According to Peter Jakab the flanged piece is not accurate to the 1905 configuration of the Flyer III. The Wrights in 1905 used a wood assembly joined together by small flat plates and screws. The solid flat piece now on the Flyer was substituted in the 1947–50 restoration for the missing actuator.

More information: The Atlantic

The fact that the great scientist believed

in flying machines was the one thing

that encouraged us to begin our studies.

Wilbur Wright