One Hundred Years of Altitude (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine June 2002

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One Hundred Years of Altitude (Cont.)


	Wings and prayers: Toung takes his Ultralight on a training flight in Richmond last spring. (Chris Buck)

"LET'S GO FLY," Young says. It's a sunny, gusty February day, and Young, Taylor, and I pile into Young's Lincoln Town Car for a trip to the Chesterfield airport, where he keeps his recently acquired MaxAir Drifter ultralight, an 80-horsepower small-winged aerial buggy that he's using to hone his piloting skills. En route, Young starts gabbing about the Wrights.

"They go down there in 1900 with all these crazy ideas, and all their letters home are about birds," he says. "The pelicans are skimming. They see ospreys surrendering airspeed for altitude. It's all the aerodynamic forces at play. All the answers to the mysteries they're pursuing are around them in this isolated, incredible place where they return again and again. That's when it occurs to me that it's their special place, where magic happens. If you take intelligence and steady perseverance and put it together with inspiration—boom!—you've got genius."

I ask Young if he thinks he can really be airbirne by summer. "Ask the Wrights," he says evasively. "Once they get to Hatteras, it takes them three weeks to assemble the plane and 20 days of tinkering. That's what it'll take us."

Like the Wrights, Young was a self-starter. Neither Orville nor Wilbur graduated from college. Young dropped out of the Florida Institute of Technology and Lowell Tech in Massachusetts before leaving school for good in 1970 and buying into five former Dunkin' Donuts franchises in Rhode Island. By age 20 he was married, separated, the single father of two kids, fed up with fried dough, and working in the hotel banquet business in Virginia. "I'd work my ass off, save some money, then quit. My father said I was unemployable, and he was right."

Unemployable, perhaps, but not unmotivated. A deep-rooted compulsion led to a serious jones for flying, a sport that brought him to the Wrights. In 1974 Young heard about the emerging Outer Banks hang-gliding scene off Jockey's Ridge in Nags Head. He went south to join the action but made a fateful stop at the Wright Brothers Memorial at Kill Devil Hills, his first encounter with a reproduction of their gossamer-covered '02 biwing. A hobbyist who had built models of historic planes, Young asked around for a set of plans. There were none.

Undeterred, he began measuring the memorial's glider to draw up his own schematics. But in comparing old photos with the reproduction, he noticed that the version in front of him was quite different from the original. A research trip to the Library of Congress ensued, as did a meeting with Marvin MacFarland, a renowned Wright brothers scholar who edited the venerated Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright, published in 1953. MacFarland was running the library's science and technology collection; Young brashly knocked on his door.



	The upper wing of the '03 materializes in the Virginia Aviation Museum. (Chris Buck)

"He said, 'What do you want?'" Young recalls. Young told him he'd been doing research and had found documentation about the Wrights that wasn't in MacFarland's book. "He said, 'Come back at 4:45 and I'll give you 15 minutes.'" The pair wound up drinking until midnight at a nearby bar. "I became convinced that this was something I should dedicate my life to," says Young. "And MacFarland became my mentor."

By 1980 Young had completed and flown his first Wright glider, the '02. After splitting with Hyde and The Wright Experience in the early nineties, he worked briefly with Tom Norton, cofounding Wright Redux and setting his sights again on a working '03. But he quickly grew frustrated with Redux—the crew was fumbling around, trying to solve basic design problems—so he left in 1999.

It was during his stint with Wright Redux that Young met Udo Joerges, who had built and taken a few short hops in a 1909 Model A, one of the later-model planes that the Wrights licensed to Germany. Joerges could produce the one thing Young couldn't: a functioning duplicate of the Wrights' original '03 engine. Along with a third partner, Mark Kandl, they decided to finance and build a perfect '03 Flyer. So far the team has spent $250,000, an investment they hope to recoup through sponsorships and educational events.

We arrive at the airport. Taylor hops outside and drags the blue ultralight into the sunlight as Young slips into a flight suit. He dons a helmet and starts examining the flimsy-looking two-seat plane. "This is very draggy and sensitive, so it has flight characteristics closer to what the Wrights have," he says, waggling the rudder with his hand. A gust of wind buffets us.

"Might be too windy to fly," Young says, but he settles into the cockpit anyway. "Clear prop!"

As Young taxis toward the runway, Taylor and I trundle after him. "I was up till 2 a.m. fixing stuff at the restaurant, and I'm exhausted," Taylor says, shaking his head. "He's the thinker and I'm the doer, and when Rick gets going it's seven days a week till late at night. My wife says she never sees me."

Young revs the ultralight and pops off the runway. He climbs, clears the swaying treetops, and starts tossing up and down like a kite without a tail. After a minute he swings around, lands, and taxis up with his arm out, thumb down.

"Wa-a-ay too windy," he shouts. "In the '03, the Wright brothers are flying for the first time in an airplane in 26 knots and they themselves later say it's crazy."

Young climbs out. "Come back next week," he tells me. "Maybe the weather will be better."

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