One Hundred Years of Altitude (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine June 2002

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One Hundred Years of Altitude (Cont.)


	Grover Taylor (holding model) and Rick Young at the outer banks, North Carolina, March 2002 (Chris Buck)

AN EASY WAY TO ANNOY RICK YOUNG is to ask the question that adventurers dread: Um, why exactly are you doing this? The dangers involved are considerable. Though Young has sustained only minor cuts and bruises while flying replica Wright gliders, the '03 Flyer is a riskier proposition. The added weight and thrust of the 200-pound motor means that going even 30 feet off the ground could be deadly in such a wobbly and unfamiliar contraption.

I raise this at dinner one night. Young, Taylor, and I are sitting in one of Young's restaurants, the Half Way House, a 240-year-old former stagecoach stop that now caters to Richmond businessmen. Taylor is eating a hamburger, while Young nibbles on a tiny salad, part of a three-month crash diet intended to help him shed 40 pounds on his way to Wilbur's flying weight of 150.

"If that's the question, then let's argue the question," Young says, talking about the Wrights with a present-tense immediacy. "In a speech to the Western Society of Engineers, Wilbur says there are two ways of learning to ride a horse. One is to sit on the fence and watch, and the other is to mount the beast!

"You have to take risks to make progress," Young declares. "Everyone will crash, but the difference is, why is it being done? The whole idea is to understand the process, to stumble along and say, 'Why did the Wright brothers do this?' Then you do it and understand, and that's incredibly satisfying."

The Wrights' derring-do is a big part of what drives Young. The brothers were little-known bicycle mechanics in their late twenties and early thirties when they beat some of the finest engineering minds on the planet in the race to fly first. By the time they began building planes at the turn of the century, a host of inventors had been launching themselves skyward for decades—and flopping dramatically in everything from box kites to steam-powered airplanes.

At least two people were killed trying to be the first to fly, while many others were injured. German glider pioneer Otto Lilienthal crashed and died in 1896 in the hills an hour outside Berlin. In 1898, Francis Pierpont Langley, the Secretary of the Smithsonian and America's leading aviation scientist, received a $50,000 contract from the U.S. Army to launch a gasoline-powered plane from a catapult affixed to the roof of a houseboat on the Potomac River. His machine, carrying his assistant Charles Manly, crashed twice, almost killing Manly.

Most engineers at the time believed the secret of powered flight was to create an aerodynamically stable aircraft—with the right design, they assumed, you could simply drive off into the clouds. But flight is rarely stable. You need to independently control and balance the three variables of pitch (nose up or down), yaw (nose left or right), and roll (wings tilting to either side). The Wrights understood this in the same way they understood bicycles, which require learned, counterintuitive balance. Beginning in 1900, Orville and Wilbur built three gliders with increasingly sophisticated means of three-axis control. During the next three years, amid the breezy, open dunes of the Outer Banks, the brothers taught themselves the delicate art of flying, with themselves as test pilots.

In the summer of 1902 alone, the Wrights personally made 600 flights, managing to stay airborne for about 30 seconds at a time, often in howling winds of nearly 30 miles per hour. During a few short months back home in Dayton, Ohio, they built a lightweight, four-cylinder engine and returned to the Outer Banks in late 1903 with the plane that changed everything. By the time anyone else managed to stay aloft for even 60 seconds, the Wrights were cruising for a half-hour at a time. And that was only the beginning. In the years that followed, Orville and Wilbur continued to test and fly new planes, crashing frequently but going for it again and again—like Dew Dudes in tweed jackets. The worst wreck happened in 1908, during a series of demonstration flights for the Army: Orville injured his back, and Thomas Selfridge, an Army lieutenant helping to evaluate the plane, was killed.

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