29 Kill Devil Hill

It is a blustery day out here in the skinny outer bank islands north of Cape Hatteras. The sand dunes are certainly big here. Kill Devil Hill for example is a cone about 90 ft high.

The two brothers came here to experiment and practice.

Back in Dayton Ohio, they ran a bicycle company. Quietly and systematically they were pursuing another idea. They experimented with kites; they built a wind tunnel; they watched how birds made turns. They made gliders that you could lie on. In the winter they put the bits of their latest version on a boat and brought them over to the bank islands. They launched each other from Kill Devil Hill where it was always windy.

After hundreds of glides they established that you could not build a glider that would fly itself (any more than a racing dinghy would sail itself). You had to actively control pitch and yaw. And to turn you had to bank not just steer with rudder like a boat.

They became pilots.

Then they worked on engines and propellers.


The ‘Flyer’ is bigger than you expect. There is a copy of it here. The wings are forty feet across. It looks so delicate and fragile you would be afraid that the wind would flip it over and crumple it up. The wings, covered in white cloth, are separated by slender laths clipped into place and held by tensed wires. The engine (which got red hot after a short time) drives the propellers through bicycle chains. The driver lay in the middle, controlled the elevators with his hands and the wing twist and rudder with wires attached to his hips.

It was blowing 27 knots on 17 December 1903 but they went ahead anyway. In the first four trials they took off and flew 120, 175, 200 and 852 feet from their workshop. The National Park Service has placed granite stones at each of these points.

Just five years later the Wright Brothers were flying 20 mile circuits around Paris.