Ken Hyde is a retired American
Airlines pilot and president and founder of The Wright Experience. Ken,
whose company has been contracted by EAA to exactly reproduce the 1903
Wright Flyer, says, “There’s a good
possibility that I’ll be one of the two finalists. But I won’t be
disappointed if I’m not.”
Ken earned both his pilot and mechanic certificates while he was in high
school. Following graduation, he went to work as a mechanic for Capital
Airlines. In 1961, Ken joined the Bendix Corporation as a
co-pilot/mechanic.
He joined American Airlines in 1965 and retired in 1998 with 33 years of
service on equipment from DC-6s to 727s. The same year he went to work for
American, he founded Virginia Aviation, a company specializing in antique
aircraft restoration. Hyde-restored aircraft made their way into museums
and gathered accolades, then in 1992 the Army Aviation Museum at Fort
Rucker, Alabama, commissioned Ken to build a 1911 Wright Model B—the
Army’s first practical airplane. It was then that his attentions and
energies turned to telling the largely untold and unrecorded story of the
Wright brothers through painstaking research and the reproduction of the
Wrights’ flight experiments.
“My goal is to see this reenactment, and to see the Wright brothers get
the credit that they’ve never received in all these years, Ken says.
“This is our last chance to do it correctly.”
