Under the Hood of a Wright Flyer
Aviation historians and restorers get a rare peek at a 98-year-old engine.
- By Linda Shiner
- Air & Space magazine, November 2006
Passenger Thomas Selfridge (left) and Orville Wright prepare to take off at Fort Myer, Virginia on September 17, 1908. They crashed soon after, and Selfridge became the first air fatality.
NASM
After the 2003 hoopla commemorating the 100th anniversary of flight, most of us stopped thinking about the Wright brothers. But the brothers didn’t stop building airplanes in 1903. They went on to invent 18 more types, including the world’s first military airplane, built to satisfy a request by the U.S. Army Signal Corps for an observation aircraft that could carry two people and enough fuel to fly 125 miles at speeds of at least 40 mph. The airplane that eventually won the contract, the 1909 Wright Military Flyer, is in the National Air and Space Museum. Its predecessor, the one the brothers first hoped to sell to the Army, crashed during a September 1908 demonstration at Fort Myer, Virginia, killing its passenger Lieutenant Thomas O. Selfridge, who was observing the flight for the Signal Corps.
That’s the airplane Ken Hyde wants to reproduce.
“It does not exist in any form,” says Hyde, founder of the Wright Experience and an expert on the Wright brothers’ airplanes. “There’s an early Wright of the same period in the Deutches Museum in Munich,” he says, “but it has a French engine.”
He and his team have already built a dozen Wright craft for various museums and exhibitions, including the reproduction 1903 Flyer that failed to get airborne (through no fault in the aircraft) in the rainy 2003 re-enactment of the first flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. (Memo to planners of flight re-enactments: Fragile reproductions fly when the weather permits, not at pre-ordained places and times.)
“Everybody’s hung up on the centennial,” says Hyde, “but that airplane never flew after ’03. We’re trying to uncover steps in the development of a technology.” The 1908 machine includes certain engineering innovations based on what the brothers had learned from their earlier flights, but would change by the time of the 1909 Flyer. “It’s a very significant link,” says Hyde.
The curatorial staff of the National Air and Space Museum agrees, which is how Hyde got permission to erect scaffolding in the Museum’s Early Flight gallery last month, climb up to the 1909 Military Flyer, and peek inside the engine—the only original piece left from the crashed 1908 model. In order to recreate the earlier machine, Hyde and his engine expert Greg Cone, have to measure and study its engine.
“It’s like Al Capone’s safe,” Hyde remarked after Museum restoration specialist Karl Heinzel removed the engine’s cover to give Cone access. It was the first time the engine had been uncovered since 1911, the year the Signal Corps transferred the airplane to the Smithsonian.
Cone shone a flashlight on the innards of the little 4-cylinder engine resting on a wooden engine mount on the biplane’s lower wing. He looked like an archaeologist peering into a pharoah’s tomb.
Comments (2)
Phil Parmelee, a cousin of mine, was in the movie A Dash Through the Clouds, flying the Wright Flyer Model B. That was the plane he crashed in 1912.
Posted by junior parmelee on October 1,2009 | 05:41 PM
The Selfridge killed in the air accident described above was not Thomas O. Selfridge, but rather Lt. Thomas Etholen Selfridge. He was related to two Thomas O. Selfridges who were naval admirals and was also my great-grandmother's brother.
Posted by Bobbee L. Gerson on May 30,2011 | 10:51 PM