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THE WRIGHT FLYER III
Inside a stately brick building at Dayton History’s Carillon Historical Park, a railing surrounds a sunken floor occupied by a primitive airplane with yellowed wings. On a typical day, visitors gather behind the railing to gaze down on the airplane. The name of the building is Wright Hall, and it was built for one purpose: to preserve and display the 1905 Wright Flyer III, the world’s first practical airplane. It’s the only airplane that’s a National Historic Landmark, and it’s a unit of the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park.
Unlike the stubby 1903 and ’04 flyers, the 1905 machine is a sculpture of flight. Its balanced proportions and upward sweeping lines make it seem eager to fly. But its elegant design is merely a byproduct of form following function. The Wright brothers were striving for practicality, not beauty. Its pleasing lines resulted from enlarging the elevator and extending it farther ahead of the wings. Putting the elevator farther out in front slowed its response rate and made it easier to control pitch oscillations. To support the elevator, the flyer’s runners were lengthened and bowed smoothly upward.
The Wright Flyer III also embodied many less noticeable changes from the earlier flyers. The Wright brothers uncoupled its rudder from the wing warping system and added a separate lever to allow them to control the rudder independently. At the same time, they added a pair of half-round vanes they called blinkers between the upper and lower surfaces of the elevator. They reused the 1904 engine, which was just getting broken in; tests showed it was delivering more horsepower than when it was new. But they added a fuel pump, an oil pump and a water pump.
The original Wright Flyer III at Dayton History’s Carillon Historical Park is also a unit of the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park. Author’s photo.
Front view of Mark Dusenberry’s replica 1905 Wright motor. Author’s photo.
Even before testing the 1905 machine, Wilbur and Orville were confident they had a marketable product. “We stand ready to furnish a practical machine for use in war at once, that is, a machine capable of carrying two men and fuel for a fifty-mile trip,” Wilbur wrote to Chanute on May 28.
They weren’t nearly ready, but they didn’t know it yet. They still had one more secret to discover—one that even today claims the lives of unwary pilots.
Tests of the 1905 machine through the summer weren’t much more successful than the previous year. Crashes, damage and repairs were frequent. On July 14, a flight by Orville started well, but as the flyer gained speed, it began to undulate “and suddenly turned downward and struck [the ground] at a considerable angle,” Wilbur wrote in his diary. The crash snapped the top wing spars. Orville “was thrown violently out through the broken top surface but suffered no injury at all,” Wilbur wrote. The spars broke in just the right places to spare him from potentially serious injury.
It could have ended much differently, as a strikingly similar crash showed more than a century later. In 2005 and 2007, Mark Dusenberry of Dennison, Ohio reenacted the Wright brothers’ flights on Huffman Prairie with an exquisite Wright Flyer III replica he had built himself. On October 1, 2009, he was making a practice flight for the third such event when the flyer began undulating and suddenly pitched down, slamming into the ground. Dusenberry suffered severe injuries and lost the use of his legs. The crash destroyed his replica. It was a sobering reminder of the danger the Wright brothers faced every time they flew.1
Mark Dusenberry reenacted the October 5, 1905 flight of the Wright Flyer III on Huffman Prairie in 2005 and 2007. This photo shows a successful practice flight in 2009 before a crash. Author’s photo.
The Wright brothers tweaked the 1905 design repeatedly. They got rid of the blinkers, further enlarged the elevators and extended them farther ahead of the wings. They also enlarged the vertical rudder.
Finally, three months into the flying season, their flying improved. They stayed aloft longer and showed better control. On September 8, Orville flew the first figure eight by either brother.
On September 28, Orville learned another lesson the only way nature teaches it: by experience. He was eight minutes into a flight and was headed toward an isolated honey locust tree that marked the western edge of their course over the prairie. Orville was about ten feet higher than the forty-foot-tall tree. As he banked for a left turn, Orville noticed he was slipping toward the tree and its shaggy armor of long, sharp thorns. He tried to bank to the right to steer away from it, but the left wings refused to rise. As the tree loomed closer, Orville pushed the elevator down hard in an effort to land before he went into it.
Immediately the left wings came up and the flyer turned to the right. A wing brushed the tree with enough force to drive a thorn into a strut and rip a branch from the tree. Orville quickly turned the elevator up, and instead of slamming into the ground, the flyer just grazed it before nudging back into the air. Orville skimmed the ground until he was back at the shed, the thorny branch defiantly hanging on.
Analyzing the incident afterward, Wilbur and Orville realized what had happened. As the flyer banked into a left turn, its left wings were on the inside of the turn and were moving more slowly than the right wings. The lower, slower wing surfaces became stalled, producing little lift, so the wing warping did no good. When Orville pushed the nose down, the wings sped up, and the left surfaces became effective again. In a summary of their 1905 experiments, Wilbur described the insight gained from Orville’s brush with the locust tree as their final breakthrough to practical flight: “When we had discovered the real nature of the trouble, and knew that it would always be remedied by tilting the machine forward a little, so that its flying speed would be restored, we felt that we were ready to place flying machines on the market.”2
Orville flies about sixty feet above Huffman Prairie on September 29, 1905. Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
With no handbook or instructor, the Wright brothers were lucky to survive long enough to discover the solution to this problem. Today, basic flying manuals flag it as one of the biggest hazards in the landing pattern, when the pilot is low and slow and making the final turn to line up with the runway. If the turn is too wide, the pilot may be tempted to correct it by tightening the turn. This can cause the wing on the inside of the turn to stall just as Orville’s did. With the airplane slow and close to the ground, the consequences can be deadly.
Wilbur’s and Orville’s flights continued to get longer—nearly twenty minutes on September 29, twenty-five minutes on October 3 and more than thirty-three minutes on the fourth. On October 5, Wilbur flew for thirty-nine minutes, twenty-three seconds (Milton recorded it in his diary as thirty-eight minutes, four seconds), circling over the field for the equivalent of more than twenty-four miles. Wilbur landed only when the flyer ran out of fuel. That flight alone exceeded the total duration of all 105 flights of 1904.
Landowner Torrence Huffman and his son William were on hand to witness the historic flight. They had taken the interurban out to Simm’s Station and were walking down the road toward the flyer when Beard, the tenant farmer, pulled up on a wagon loaded with corn. The Huffmans climbed onto the wagon to watch the flight. “It went round and round and each time the plane circled the field we put a pencil mark on the floor of the wagon,” William Huffman recalled in 1978.3
Orville in the Wright Flyer III on the last photographed flight of 1905. Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
As the flights grew longer, more people heard about them, and the local press began publishing reports. The Dayton Daily News published an article about their October 5 flight the next day. Soon, a crowd lined the fence, some with cameras. The Wright brothers decided not to fly until the crowd went away. The rest of the world might not have heard about the Wright brothers’ flights, but they were becoming common knowledge in Dayton and Greene County.
Wilbur took off again on October 16, but engine trouble forced him down after a single lap. The brothers planned to make one more flight, staying aloft for more than an hour, and wanted Chanute to see it. He would have made an expert witness to their feat. On October 30, they wired him to ask if he could come down from Chicago to watch a flight the next day. Chanute hopped on a train, but a storm thwarted the flight and ended the flying season. The October 5 flight stood as their longest of 1905.
The Wright Flyer III was the culmination of their experiments. While they had proved flight was possible with the 1903 Flyer in Kitty Hawk, their flights in the Wright Flyer III on Huffman Prairie proved it was practical.