Remembering the Wright Flight
Exactly 122 years ago today, a strange structure constructed out of ash wood, cotton fabric, and bicycle wire accomplished what thousands of years of attempts never could: human flight.
The catalyst for this genius? A pair of brothers: Orville and Wilbur Wright.
We at TapRooT®, with many of our clients working and innovating within the field of aviation, owe a lot to the brothers’ groundbreaking work in establishing the field in the first place. So today, for the anniversary of their first flight, I’d like to take a moment to remember their contributions.
The brothers had been working on their flight project since 1899, but were kept out of the limelight by the more public experiments of Samuel Langley. Langley used the motors available at the time to keep a craft in the air, but flights were short and left their passengers entirely at the machine’s mercy, as there was no available technology to allow a passenger to fly the machine themselves. Gliders had been successfully steered for years, but sustained, powered flight was seen as an impossibility in the era of extremely heavy trains and boats.
It was the Wright brothers who would change this.
Before the 1903 Flyer ever took to the skies, the brothers had designed the first efficient airplane propeller. Prior to this innovation, the only available propellers were marine propellers, which were far too heavy and inefficient for air travel. The Wright Brothers knew that, unlike with Langley’s bulky machines, a successful flight would take advantage of propellers, lightweight materials, and surfaces that utilized the wind.
When the time came to test their invention, the brothers made their way to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, which hosted wide open spaces and strong winds. There, they flipped a coin to decide who would win the opportunity to fly for the first time. Wilbur won the coin toss, but the engine immediately stalled and he crashed the plane, paving the way for Orville to fly the first controlled airplane three days later.
The flight took off at 10:35, and dipped up and down frantically as Orville got the hang of the controls. It flew for 120 feet in 12 seconds, reaching an airspeed of 34 mph. It seems minuscule in comparison to the hours long, steady flights of today, but it was enough to launch humanity into the sky.
The brothers flew three more times that day, taking turns. Wilbur’s second flight did much better, surpassing his brother by flying 852 feet in 59 seconds.
In establishing the aviation industry, the Wright brothers paved the way for millions of future innovations. Modern aviators thrive in a high pressure environment where high reliability is a necessity, and constantly consider creative solutions to the safety issues they face on a daily basis.
It is this innovation that we aim to cultivate with TapRooT® RCA, a culture that reacts to failure with creativity to intentionally and continuously grow their industry. If you would like to learn more about how TapRooT® RCA helps those in aviation and other high-risk workplaces to craft safer systems, contact us for a free briefing here.
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