The Wright
Experience, 2001 and Counting... Down
Counting down to Kitty Hawk and the centennial celebration of powered
flight
By Jack Cox
One hundred years ago this month, 33-year-old Wilbur Wright and his 29-year-old brother, Orville, were still puzzling over the lack of lift produced by the wings of the biplane glider they had tested on the Outer Banks of North Carolina the previous October. Although its airfoil section had been designed using air pressure tables compiled by the late German engineer Otto Lilienthal, the glider had proven capable of lifting Wilbur’s 140 pounds only at an excessively high angle of attack. Still laboring at the very beginning of their quest to solve the mysteries of flight, the Wrights had encountered this and so many other new problems at Kitty Hawk that on one occasion Orville was moved to comment, "Will was so mixed up he couldn’t even theorize."
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The Wright Model
"B" built for College Park Aviation Museum is a
testament to the authentic workmanship of The Wright Experience.
Since it was the best documented of the early Wright Flyers, the
Model B provides a solid base line of technological information to
the Wright Experience. |
In April 1901 Wilbur and Orville had two and a half more years of history-making discovery to struggle through before they were finally able to present humanity with the gift of flight. Today, a group of similarly determined researchers and artisans have the same short time span to reverse engineer the Wrights’ work to arrive at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 2003, with an exact reproduction of the Wrights’ 1903 Flyer, ready at precisely 10:35 a.m. to recreate the world’s first three-axis controlled, powered flight.
The Experimental Aircraft Association has commissioned one of its longtime members, Ken Hyde of Warrenton, Virginia, who heads The Wright Experience, to build the flight-capable 2003 Flyer as the centerpiece of EAA’s Countdown to Kitty Hawk. Already well into both the testing and hardware stages of the project, The Wright Experience is taking a unique approach that involves far more than simply constructing an airframe and engine.
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Greg Cone runs the
Wright Vertical 4 engine #20 in June 2000. |
What sets The Wright Experience apart is its goal of building the Countdown to Kitty Hawk’s 2003 Flyer precisely as the Wrights did, right down to the thread count in the muslin that will cover the wings and control surfaces and the sequence and depth of the gouges made in the wood during the hand carving of the original propellers. Ken and his crew want to discover and understand why and how every part of the airplane was designed, built, and flown.
The Wright Experience wants to document its experiences and publicize them in a manner that will, once and for all, destroy the popular myth that the Wrights were simply a couple of clever bicycle mechanics who came along at the right time to put together existing technology to create the airplane. The aviation world has always recognized that the Wrights’ discoveries required a degree of genius comparable to that necessary for any of the great technological milestones of human history. The Wright Experience and EAA want the rest of the world to recognize and appreciate that genius.
Ken Hyde and The Wright Experience are, of course, no strangers to EAA members. Those who were around during the Rockford years will recall Ken and Speedy, his little Lycoming O-145-powered Aeronca C-3, which he still owns today. In the 1970s Ken gained national attention as the restorer of a number of vintage aircraft, the most notable of which was the ex-Woody Edmondson Clipwing Monocoupe, Little Butch, for owner John McCulloch.
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The EAA 1903 Flyer
lower center section under construction. |
In 1992 the Army Aviation Museum at Fort Rucker, Alabama, commissioned Ken to build a reproduction of the 1911 Wright Model B that had become the Army’s first practical airplane. The research he completed for that project led Ken directly to The Wright Experience. Already within the final decade leading up to the 100th anniversary of the Wright brothers’ first powered flight in 1903, this endeavor set the goal of reproducing and flying examples of all the Wrights’ developmental aircraft, plus a flyable Model B. The Wright Experience began being featured in displays at Oshkosh in 1997 and, later, at Sun ’n Fun as well.
In the midst of all this activity Ken found time to become one of the founders of the Bealeton Flying Circus, served a term as president of EAA’s Antique/Classic (now Vintage Aircraft Association) Chapter 3—and, oh yes, managed to squeeze in a career as a captain for American Airlines.
The Wright Model B has become a sort of technological base line for The Wright Experience because it’s the best documented of the early Wright Flyers. Roughly 75 Model Bs were built in the United States and Europe, so all the information on materials and construction methods that had to be prepared for dissemination to the various plants is the best source available today on the particulars of building Wright airplanes.
With no prior experience on which to base their selection of materials and methods of fabrication, the Wrights had to invent every part of their airframes—and, typically, went about the process by methodically testing each of them to be certain they were of adequate strength. All the early Wright aircraft were of evolutionary design—whatever was found to work was usually carried over to succeeding models. That fortunate fact has been the most direct reverse engineering path back to the ’03 Flyer for The Wright Experience.Although a great body of technical papers, articles, and correspondence by the Wrights survives today, there are enough gaps in the documentation of the research that went into the ’03 Flyer that some present day verification is necessary to ensure that a reproduction will actually fly in 2003. The problem is simply that the ’03 Flyer was a very marginal airplane in terms of performance. Think about it: The Wrights went to Kitty Hawk in 1903 to make history with an aircraft that weighed about the same as a J-3 Cub—that had to fly on 12 hp!
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The EAA 1903 Flyer
left upper and lower wings take shape in The Wright Experience
workshop. |
The airfoil sections used in their ’02 glider and ’03 Flyer were based on these wind tunnel findings, but there was a factor in the construction of the Wrights’ wings that raises a red flag today. The ribs of the ’03 Flyer slipped into pockets sewn into the lower surface fabric, but there was no means, such as rib stitching, to secure the fabric to the tops of the ribs. Obviously, this would allow some upward ballooning of the fabric in flight, changing the shape of the airfoil section. The effect this could have on lift, drag, and pitching moment is a legitimate concern—again, when considering that a 750-pound airframe liberally latticed with wires and festooned with a forest of struts will have to be hauled aloft by just 12 hp.
For that reason, The Wright Experience, Old Dominion University, Wichita State University, and NASA Langley have worked together to perform wind tunnel tests on a Wright Model B airfoil. The testing of a full-size fabric-covered section was conducted at Wichita State University in its Walter H. Beech 7-by-10-foot Low Speed Wind Tunnel, and a third-scale solid-surface section was tested at NASA Langley in its Low Turbulence Pressure Tunnel.
The results of the separate tests were similar and correlated well with the Wrights’ 1901 wind tunnel tests. There was an as-yet unresolved difference in pitching moment between the full-scale and one-third scale tests (it was greater in the full-scale testing), but the key finding was that "the effect of the fabric deformation on airfoil performance within the normal operating range does not appear to be dramatic." (Wind Tunnel Testing of the Wright Brothers’ Model B Airfoil, AIAA -2001-0310)
When Wilbur and Orville Wright left Kitty Hawk for their home in Dayton, Ohio, in the fall of 1902, they knew they had become the first persons in history to fully unlock the secrets of controlled flight. They knew from the final version of their ’02 glider it was simply a matter of scaling up its wing and control surface areas to accommodate the weights of an engine and propelling system to achieve their ultimate goal of fully controlled, powered flight.
Or so they thought.
So consuming of their time and effort were the problems of achieving sufficient lift and three-axis control that, amazingly, only perfunctory thought had gone into an engine and propeller before the dawning of the fateful year of 1903. Both were, in fact, considered givens up to that point. The Wrights had assumed they could simply order an engine suitable for their needs from one of a number of marine, stationary, and automotive engine manufacturers of that day, but that was not to be the case.
They required an engine capable of producing a sustained 8 hp and weighing no more than 200 pounds. No off-the-shelf engine met these requirements, and no manufacturer expressed any interest in building one on special order. The result was that Orville Wright designed the necessary powerplant, which was built in the brothers’ bicycle shop largely by their machinist, Charlie Taylor. Although grossly inefficient by modern standards, the little 200 cubic-inch horizontal, inline four actually produced more power than the Wrights expected. It could crank out 16 hp briefly, but quickly settled back to 12 continuous hp after warming up. Its dry weight was 179 pounds.
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The Wright
Experience was able to benefit from the expertise of Mr. Larry
Parks, an authority on circa 1900 woodworking tools and
techniques. He was able to identify tools most likely used by the
Wright brothers, and carved the 1903 propeller. |
The propellers are something else again, just as they were in 1903. Even within the aviation world, few today recognize the significance of the ’03 propellers. When the Wrights returned to Dayton late in 1902 to begin work on the ’03 Flyer, they assumed that building propellers would be a relatively simple matter of borrowing some books on marine screws from the library and adapting the science behind their blade shapes and angles to design aircraft propellers.
To his dismay, Wilbur quickly learned there was no science behind marine screw design in 1902! Over the next three months he and Orville created the basic propeller theory that is still in use today. They were the first to realize that an airplane propeller is simply a rotating wing, and thus they were able to fall back on much of the airfoil research they had done the previous winter. The wood propellers they ultimately designed and built for the ’03 Flyer were the most efficient ever conceived up to that time, and given the mere 12 hp available to them, the propellers were unquestionably the difference between success and failure at Kitty Hawk on December 17, 1903.
The problem for The Wright Experience is that for some reason Wilbur and Orville, who ordinarily were meticulous documenters of their work, put little on paper regarding their all-important propeller research. Just three small notebooks filled with numbers and tables exist today, but the information is not complete enough to facilitate the reproduction of the Wright propellers.
Fortunately, the remains of the original ’03 propellers and an ’04 propeller have been made available to The Wright Experience and have been digitally measured. That data was used to drive a five-axis milling machine to precisely reproduce an ’04 propeller, but an ’03 propeller has been carved by hand, just as the Wrights built theirs a century ago.
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It is unknown
which of the brothers actually carved the propellers. Wilbur
made two reference to the carving and the tools used, but didn't
mention if he had done the carving himself. Left is the prop
hand carved by Larry Parks beside the original 1903 Flyer
prop. |
One cannot overstate the importance of the Wrights’ propellers. With so little horsepower to work with, they had to use as much of it as possible by increasing their propeller disc area to the maximum allowed by their airframe configuration and size. That is why they chose to go with two large, slow-turning propellers. Geared down by a chain drive from the engine’s wide open 1090 rpm (it had no throttle) to around 350 rpm and turning in opposite directions to counteract the torque of each, the props pushed enough air to make history in 1903—and it appears safe to assume the reproduction can repeat the feat in 2003.
Aside from the airfoil and propeller testing, the construction of wing ribs and other airframe parts was underway as the year 2001 began. Work will continue in the months ahead, interrupted only by displays at Sun ’n Fun and EAA AirVenture 2001. Watch for continuing reports here in EAA Sport Aviation on the Countdown to Kitty Hawk activities planned by EAA and on the progress of The Wright Experience. You can also follow the ’03 Flyer reproduction project by checking out these websites: www.countdowntokittyhawk.com and www.wrightexperience.com.
