3
ON HUFFMAN PRAIRIE
Eight miles east of Dayton in Greene County, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is a sprawling, 8,100-acre campus of research laboratories, acquisition centers, a graduate-level engineering college, a foreign intelligence center, the U.S. Air Force’s national museum and an active airfield. The huge base is fenced and guarded, but some areas are open to the public. How did all this come to be here?
To find out, drive along the narrow Symmes Road through thin woods on a public part of the base until you come to a small clearing. In it stands an open-air platform, made of unpainted wood with rough handrails under a flat, angled roof. Behind it, inside the fence, lies the airfield—home over the years to flying machines ranging from primitive biplanes to nuclear-armed B-52 bombers. In the opposite direction, across Symmes Road, lies a wide, mowed pasture. On the far side of it stands a long shed and a tower, both made of wood. None of this is what you would expect to see on an air force base. The pasture is known today as the Huffman Prairie Flying Field. It’s a National Historic Landmark and a unit of the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park. The shed and the tower are replicas of the structures the Wright brothers built to test their flying machines after 1903. The platform is a replica of Simms Station, a trolley stop along the Dayton, Springfield and Urbana (DS&U) Electric Railway. Wright-Patterson’s history began here in 1904, when a DS&U trolley squealed to a stop at the station and Wilbur and Orville Wright stepped off.
A red-tailed hawk regards Mark Dusenberry’s replica 1905 Wright Flyer III from its perch atop the catapult derrick on Huffman Prairie early on October 4, 2007. Author’s photo.
The Wright brothers started 1904 full of confidence and ambitious plans. The first week of January saw them designing a better engine, ordering new parts and tracking down a good patent attorney. They had in mind building a fleet of airplanes for exhibition, possibly at the massive centennial celebration of the Louisiana Purchase being planned in St. Louis. The aviation portion of the event promised up to $200,000 in prize money. “We are at work building three machines with which we shall probably give exhibitions at different places during the coming season. We may decide to enter one at St. Louis,” Wilbur wrote to Chanute on January 18. The brothers even visited St. Louis to inspect the grounds. But the St. Louis show’s organizers had set up the course and written the rules with airships in mind; they weren’t conducive to airplanes, and the Wrights concluded they had little chance of winning any prize money. Even so, Wilbur entertained the idea as late as July in letters to Chanute.
They still had much to learn about how to make a practical flying machine, let alone how to fly it. But with a powered machine, at least they no longer needed to mount an expedition to Kitty Hawk in order to test an idea. All they needed was a big field free of obstructions. Torrence Huffman, president of the Fourth National Bank and a family friend, agreed to let them use Huffman Prairie, part of an old family farm then worked by tenant farmer David C. Beard.1
Orville knew about the site from field trips with his high school science class. The DS&U line, a part of the rapidly growing network of fast interurban railways, had begun running between Springfield and Dayton just four years earlier. The stop at Simms Station made Huffman Prairie easy to reach.
Wilbur described the prairie in a June 21, 1904 letter to Chanute:
We are in a large meadow of about 100 acres…In addition to cattle there have been a dozen or more horses in the pasture and as it is surrounded by barbwire fencing we have been at much trouble to get them safely away before making trials. Also the ground is an old swamp and is filled with grassy hummocks some six inches high so that it resembles a prairie-dog town.2
The Wright brothers erected a Kitty Hawk–style shed on Huffman Prairie in April. By the end of the month they were assembling their next airplane: the 1904 Flyer. Like the 1903 machine, it had skids and used a launching track. Wheels were as impractical on Huffman Prairie’s lumpy ground as on Kitty Hawk’s sand.
The airplane was ready by the third week in May, but day after day of rain kept them grounded. They decided to try a flight on Monday, May 23, and invited the press to come out and watch. “Our only request was that no pictures be taken, and that the reports be unsensational, so as not to attract crowds to our experiment-grounds,” Orville wrote in the Century. About a dozen journalists turned out, including reporters from all the Dayton papers. Milton and other family members also came. Altogether, a crowd of about fifty gathered on the boggy pasture to watch the Wright brothers repeat the historic flights they’d made at Kitty Hawk.
Orville (left) and Wilbur with their 1904 flyer in its shed in May 1904, at the beginning of their experiments on Huffman Prairie. Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
The event was a flop—literally. The wind barely stirred, and the engine was balky. They discovered later that a spark point had worked loose and only three cylinders were firing. But the crowd was waiting expectantly, so the brothers gave it a try. “The machine, after running the length of the track, slid off the end without rising into the air at all,” Orville wrote. Rain and engine trouble plagued them all week. A few reporters showed up at least once more, but the best they could manage was an unimpressive hop by Orville of twenty-five to sixty feet. Underwhelmed, the press by and large left the Wright brothers alone after that.
Their luck didn’t get much better in June. Bad weather and fickle winds limited their flying opportunities, and the short flights they made often ended with hard landings and damage to the airframe. “We certainly have been ‘Jonahed’ this year, partly because of bad weather, partly by being compelled to use pine spars in our wings [because spruce was in short supply], which causes breakages difficult to repair quickly,” Wilbur wrote to Chanute on June 14.
Weather was only part of the problem. They were still having trouble controlling the flyer on its pitch axis. Its nose bobbed up and down as it flew. Amos Root, a beekeeping supplier from Medina, apparently witnessed some of their troubled flights when he stopped in Dayton on a four-hundred-mile trip across Ohio. “When I first saw the apparatus it persisted in going up and down like the waves of the sea. Sometimes it would dig its nose in the dirt, almost in spite of the engineer,” he wrote in the January 1, 1905 issue of the trade journal he published, Gleanings in Bee Culture. Just as Root described, on June 25 the flyer “struck the ground in one of its undulations while going at full speed, and pointed slightly downwards,” Wilbur wrote to Chanute. They made only two flights in July. They spent most of their time rebuilding the airplane to move the center of gravity back and forth. They even added fifty pounds of steel bars to the front runners.
The ballast seemed to help. “It was finally cured of its foolish tricks, and was made to go like a steady old horse,” Root wrote. They made nine flights in the first six days of August, including one of six hundred feet on August 6. That flight was their best so far in 1904, but it was still short of Wilbur’s longest flight at Kitty Hawk.
Orville flies close to the ground on Huffman Prairie in 1904. Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
Their biggest problem now was getting enough speed to take off from their short track. The flyer needed about twenty-eight miles per hour to stay aloft, but it could barely reach twenty-four miles per hour before it ran out of track. This meant the flyer needed a slight headwind to get airborne; if they lost it, the flyer would drop to the ground. A longer track over that lumpy soil just wasn’t practical. “It is evident that we will have to build a starting device that will render us independent of wind, and are now designing one,” Wilbur wrote in an August 8 letter to Chanute.
What they came up with was a system any naval aviator today would understand: a catapult. They built a twenty-foot-tall derrick with a rope-and-pulley system that allowed them to hoist a stack of weights up to 1,400 pounds up the middle of it. Through a series of pulleys, the rope ran down to the base of the derrick, out to the end of the track and back to the flyer. A second rope attached to a stake in the ground near the pilot served as the release cable. They tried it for the first time on September 7. They found it could accelerate the flyer to twenty-eight miles per hour on sixty feet of track. This was the boost they needed. The rate and distance of their flights jumped dramatically. On September 15, they made two flights of a half-mile each, flying to the fence line and turning back.
A replica of Simms Station, where the interurban trolley stopped at Huffman Prairie, along the public entrance road to the prairie on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Author’s photo.
The similarity to aircraft carrier catapults isn’t coincidental. In a 1912 letter to Captain W. Irving Chambers of the U.S. Navy, Orville described their system and suggested using it to launch aircraft from navy ships.
Only five days later, Wilbur made history. It was his second flight of the day after an intermission of heavy rain. Shot off the track by the catapult, Wilbur cruised northeast across the prairie. With the north fence line approaching, he banked left and began a wide, gentle turn until he had completed a circle—the first ever flown in a heavier-than-air machine. He flew past his starting point before landing, having flown nearly one mile.
The local press wasn’t around to witness the flight, but Amos Root was there. His January 1905 column was a rambling, 3,500-word essay about the Wright brothers’ experiments and the whole subject of transportation, but buried near the end was an almost lyrical description of Wilbur’s flight and its emotional impact on Root:
The engine is started and got up to speed. The machine is held until ready to start by a sort of trap to be sprung when all is ready; then with a tremendous flapping and snapping of the four-cylinder engine, the huge machine springs aloft. When it first turned that circle, and came near the starting-point, I was right in front it; and I said then, and I believe still, it was one of the grandest sights, if not the grandest sight, of my life. Imagine a locomotive that has left its track, and is climbing up in the air right toward you—a locomotive without any wheels, we will say, but with white wings instead, we will further say—a locomotive made of aluminum. Well, now, imagine this white locomotive, with wings that spread 20 feet each way, coming right toward you with a tremendous flap of its propellers, and you will have something like what I saw. The younger brother bade me move to one side for fear it might come down suddenly; but I tell you, friends, the sensation that one feels in such a crisis is something hard to describe.3
Wilbur flies just above the ground on Huffman Prairie in 1904. Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
Wilbur and Orville had made 105 flights in 1904 by the time they closed the season on December 9. But their uneven record didn’t show a pattern of steady improvement. It was an indication that they had not yet mastered their invention. Wilbur wrote in his notebook that he made “almost four rounds” of the field on November 9 in a flight that lasted five minutes, four seconds. But they still hadn’t eliminated the flyer’s tendency to pitch up. Even with seventy pounds of steel bars in front, they had to hold downward pressure on the elevator as they flew. More troubling, the flyer sometimes refused to obey when they tried to bring it out of a turn, forcing them to land it with its wings still banked. “The cause of the difficulty proved to be very obscure and the season of 1904 closed without any solution of the puzzle,” Wilbur wrote later.4
But they had committed themselves to success. They let their bicycle business languish, and they would close it the next year. Charlie Taylor spent most of his time at Huffman Prairie “as sort of airport manager at Simms Station,” he wrote in Collier’s Weekly. “I suppose it was the first airport in the country, with all due respect to the sands of Kitty Hawk.”