The Birth of Flight, Reborn
By Michael E. Ruane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 12, 2000; Page A01

Spruce and ash have been found for the aircraft's ribs, though some Pacific coast wood will replace the West Virginia original the Wright brothers hauled to Kitty Hawk.

The aluminum engine block has been cast: The Wrights were experimenting with lightweight engines way back then. No problem there.

It is the muslin that will be hard to find--the tightly woven ladies underwear cloth called "Pride of the West" that the turn-of-the-century tinkerers decided would cover the wings of their flying machine.

This morning, a retired Virginia airline pilot, backed by a national aviation organization, is scheduled to announce the kickoff of a quest to construct, and for the first time fly, an exact reproduction of the famed aircraft Wilbur and Orville Wright launched at Kitty Hawk, N.C., in 1903.

The announcement is set for 10 a.m. at the Smithsonian Institution's Air and Space Museum. There, Ken Hyde, 61, of Warrenton, who is heading the effort, will detail what is billed as the centerpiece of the Wright brothers centennial in 2003.

The plan is to reproduce the Wrights' "machine" right down to the muslin, test it in an old Air Force wind tunnel and fly it at Kitty Hawk at 10:35 a.m. Dec. 17, 2003, exactly as the brothers did a century earlier.

The project has the blessing of the National Park Service, which has given permission for the reenactment at its Wright Brothers National Memorial at Kitty Hawk, and the good wishes of the Smithsonian, which has the original Wright 1903 Flyer on display.

It is being funded by the Experimental Aircraft Association, of Oshkosh, Wis., a 170,000-member organization founded in 1953 by private builders of homemade airplanes.

It will cost more than $1 million, association President Tom Poberezny said yesterday, but "the Wright brothers deserve it." Plus, he said, theirs was the first home-built airplane.

Much of the load, though, will be on Hyde, whose family's aviation roots go back to the barnstorming days of rural Virginia and who, over the past three decades, has built a sophisticated aircraft restoration complex on a 25-acre spread outside Warrenton.

And it will be Hyde, an American Airlines captain for 33 years and Boeing 727 pilot, who, if all goes as planned, must learn to fly the Wrights' bizarre design--in which the pilot is prone--without breaking his neck.

Though brilliant, the 605-pound plane was a contraption.

Its two chain-driven propellers were in the back. The elevator, which modern planes have in the tail, was up front. And it was controlled, in part, by a padded "cradle" the pilot moved with his hips.

It was extremely unstable.

Hyde also found that the Flyer's construction was a bit of a mystery.

"We know what the Wrights did," Hyde said. "We just don't know how they did it."

The process was shrouded in some secrecy, entangled in years of litigation and further clouded by Wilbur's sudden death from typhoid in 1912.

To solve it, Hyde has been engaged in a mind-bending piece of reverse engineering, a journey back down the path of invention, working his way into the heads of the two men in coats and ties who left their footprints in the North Carolina sand dunes a century before.

He found clues among letters, telegrams and personal papers scattered across a half-century.

He discovered, among other things, that unsigned copies of letters ending "very truly yours" were probably by Orville; that smudged and corrected correspondence often came from the Wrights' loyal secretary, Mabel Beck; and that the Flyer's engine ran on a forgotten kind of gasoline called "65 test."

He found two keen minds in men who were not just the "lucky bicycle mechanics" of history.

"They were bicycle mechanics for sure," Hyde said during an interview last week in his workshop. "But they were aeronautical engineers. They were scientists, craftsmen and also test pilots. These guys really set in motion the basis for the way we build airplanes today."

And they were as obsessed with their project as Hyde is with his.

"For some years I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man," Wilbur wrote in 1900. "My disease has increased in severity . . . [so that] I feel that it will soon cost me an increasing amount of money, if not my life."

In the fall of 1903, at the peak of their aeronautical research, Wilbur Wright, 36, and his brother, Orville, 32, the sons of a United Brethren Church bishop, traveled to a remote and wind-scoured stretch of North Carolina's Outer Banks.

Inveterate mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, they had made toys, a newspaper press and bicycles before becoming fascinated with the possibility of human flight about seven years before.

They had pored over previous studies on the subject, found much of it erroneous and begun conducting their own experiments. Using wood, wire and lightweight muslin, they built a series of increasingly complex gliders, which they began testing near the Outer Banks village of Kitty Hawk.

They were an odd pair, these unmarried brothers in starched collars and suits, watched by fishermen as they fiddled with oil cans and machinery on one of the most isolated stretches of land in the country. Now a sprawling resort area, Kitty Hawk, in photos of that time, looked more like the windblown surface of Mars than Earth.

The brothers traveled there in September, weathered what probably was a hurricane and freezing cold in November, and by December were finally ready.

They had fitted their craft with a specially designed four-cylinder, 12-horsepower engine that ran flat out all the time and had a tin gas tank with less than a gallon of fuel.

It was a glider no longer.

On Dec. 14, they flipped a coin. Wilbur would go first. He quickly got airborne, but only for about three seconds, and came crashing down. It was no good. Three days later, it was Orville's turn.

At 10:35 a.m. Orville, wearing a suit, tie and cap, lay face down in the hip cradle and, as a preset camera clicked a picture, took off on the world's first successful airplane flight.

It covered 120 feet and lasted 12 seconds. Though the pair would make three more flights that day--the last 852 feet and 59 seconds--it was Orville's that made history.

On the wall in an office of Ken Hyde's business, an oil-stained pair of aviation goggles hangs over a picture of a young man in leather flying togs standing before a biplane.

They are the goggles and likeness of Hyde's late father, John, and it is because of him, Hyde said, that "I grew up with an airplane in the garage."

"Captain Johnny" Hyde, as he was known, was, like the Wrights, a lover of things mechanical. A longtime railroad station manager around Nokesville, he tinkered with radios and, fascinated by aviation, learned to fly as a young man in the era of the barnstormers.

He passed down the fascination to his son, who learned to fly as a teenager, became a tinkerer himself and went on to a rich career as an airline pilot.

Last week, Ken Hyde's eyes filled when he spoke of the wonder of his life in aviation--which he traces back through his father to Kitty Hawk--and his desire to give something in return.

As he stood in blue jeans and a denim shirt, amid the clatter of his workshop and the clutter of wood and fabric, sprockets and flywheels, he explained what he did.

In 1992, with his aircraft restoration business thriving, he hit upon the idea of reproducing for posterity several of the Wrights' early models, including the famed '03 Flyer.

The Wrights were famous, he reasoned. This ought to be easy. Indeed, over time he would reproduce Wright gliders from 1900 and 1901 and two display versions of the brothers' 1911 Model B, en route to the Kitty Hawk aircraft.

But it wasn't easy.

"I thought it would be a piece of cake, you know--just go down and get some drawings and build this just like you would any other airplane," he said. Instead, "it became quite a chore . . . more of an archaeological dig," than anything. The Wrights "always intended to tell the story," Hyde said, but then Wilbur died. "And he was the writer of the two."

So Hyde set about gathering reams of Wright data--now packed in fat black binders that jam the shelves of an upstairs office--from libraries and museums across the country.

Superb data came from a major Smithsonian restoration project on the original Flyer in the mid-1980s, he said. But the plane had been through a lot.

It had been severely damaged at Kitty Hawk in 1903 and again, by a flood in Dayton, in 1913. It had been refurbished by Orville in 1928, put on display in England for three decades, and had survived the World War II blitz in an underground shelter 100 miles from London.

It was given to the Smithsonian in 1948, the year Orville died, and to the Air and Space Museum in 1976. There, this morning, it will hang above the ceremonies designed to honor the dapper mechanics who made it a revolution that is still under way.