The Wrong Wright Story: The Myth Continues

A Review of the 2022 Smithsonian book “Flight”

 

 

During the past five years this blog has occasionally carried critical reviews of Smithsonian books about the Wright brothers. These books, written by nontechnical historians, contain dozens of serious omissions and errors. Unfortunately, they have been used as source material by countless other authors and spokespersons. Consequently, largely false descriptions of the Wrights’ work have become standard fare worldwide.

To my knowledge, the only book that totally agrees with the Wright’s actual records is The WRight Story. It’s the only one researched and written by an airplane design and performance engineer. It includes many hundreds of quotes of, and references to, the Wrights’ words gleaned from the study of over a thousand of their articles, test notes, patents, letters, equipment, and other records in the Library of Congress, Franklin Institute, Wright State University, and elsewhere.

It was hoped that with the retirement of a few of the “old guard” of senior staff and spokespersons at the National Air and Space Museum, some original research would occur there and a more correct description of the Wright Brothers’ development of their airplane would emerge under the Smithsonian’s banner.

The 2022 edition of Flight: The Complete History of Aviation by R. G. Grant indicates that this has not happened. Grant is another historian with no technical or scientific credentials, but with a number of books about history to his credit. In other words, his aviation credentials are about the same as David McCullough’s were. Unfortunately the accuracy of Grant’s discussion of the Wrights is little better. Nonetheless, the latest edition, published by Penguin/Random House, proudly carries the endorsement of the Smithsonian across the top of the cover.

In yet another effort to establish “truthinaviationhistory,” the errors in Flight’s account of the Wright brothers’ work are discussed here. No effort was made to determine how many errors might exist in the remainder of the book.

First, a very important general comment is warranted. Nowhere in the eight pages Grant devotes to the Wrights is any credit given to Octave Chanute, Dr. George Spratt, or Edward Huffaker for any of the generous and vital assistance they gave the Wrights, both in letters and in person at Kitty Hawk. Although this was enumerated in this blog’s September, 2021 critique of Visions of a Flying Machine, the importance of their guidance to the Wright brothers warrants repeating here.

 

l to r: Chanute, Huffaker, O. Wright, W. Wright (Spratt is the photographer)

They provided the Wrights with

• Chanute’s 1894 book which, from 1899 on, became the basis for the Wrights’ study of earlier works in aeronautics.
• The realization that the biggest problem remaining to be solved was how to control an aircraft’s motions.
• The need to master control with gliders before adding power.
• Trussed biplane wing construction.
• The idea of first testing gliders unmanned with tethering lines.
• The best gliding areas were the Georgia and Carolina coasts.
• Huffaker and Spratt alerting the Wrights to the reversal of movement of a cambered wing’s center of lift.
• The need for the Wrights to perform tests with a wind tunnel in order to correct their wing shapes.
• Providing the Wrights with photos of wind tunnel designs and the basic design of the measuring apparatus for their tunnel.
• A summary of the 1885 report by Sydney Hollands showing that a propeller should be twisted and also cambered like a wing. (The Wrights ignored his advice about tapering blades.)
• The design of a falling weight catapult enabling flight testing near Dayton and the Wrights’ flying for the next seven years.

Smithsonian authors have written that Chanute was of little to no help to the Wrights, even implying he was more trouble than he was worth to them. They used the omission of these documented facts to build the myth of the Wrights’ “genius” having enabled them to simply envision correct aerodynamic flows and the solutions to all of the problems they encountered. Nevertheless, the facts listed above are all documented with referenced first-hand proofs in The WRight Story.

Obviously, without these critical and timely inputs, the Wrights may well not have succeeded. If they somehow did, it would have taken them far longer, probably denying them the reputation of being the first to accomplish powered manned flight.

On his page 24, Grant writes “One of the Wrights’ objectives in the 1901 flights was to achieve controlled banked turns.” This is a clear indication that he used earlier Smithsonian publications for references rather than examining original Wright material. To make matters worse, he even misinterpreted those books.

Actually, the 1901 vehicle had no rudder whatsoever, making it impossible “to achieve smooth banked turns.” Even when they added a rudder in 1902 it was to enable the aircraft to continue flying straight when wing warping was used to correct roll. That’s why they connected the two controls. The Wrights’ patent drafted in 1902 make that perfectly clear on page one, lines 16-30 and lines 55-61, and page four, lines 16-45. They didn’t even try to make turns until 1904 at Huffman Prairie, and it took them two years and numerous crashes and redesigns to accomplish it then.

So when the author says, further down on page 24, that the Wrights discovered the wing-warp-induced yaw problem when they attempted turns, he is absolutely wrong, just like the previous Smithsonian authors and all others that have parroted that statement since.

Further down on page 24 he contradicts one of the previous points about the Chanute group’s contributions by writing as though the Wrights came up with the idea of a wind tunnel and its design on their own. But he’s in good company since all previous Smithsonian publications made the same misleading omission.

On page 25 he claims that the Wrights’ bicycle tests in 1902 showed them that the airfoil data from Otto Lilienthal that they used were wrong. Here he manages to make two errors in one sentence. First, the Wrights used the bicycle tests to correct the air density coefficient, not to determine actual airfoil lift data. Any lift data obtained from the bicycle tests was inconclusive.  Also, near the end of their wind tunnel testing Wilbur wrote, “for a surface like that described in his [Lilienthal’s] book [his lift coefficient] table is probably as near correct as it is possible.” Later he admitted “It is very evident….that a table based on one aspect [ratio] and [wing section] profile is worthless for a surface of different aspect and curvature. This no doubt explains why we have had so much trouble figuring all our machines from Lilienthal’s table.” Here the Wrights clearly admitted that their lifting problems in 1900 and 1901 were due to their own errors and not Lilienthal’s.

However in making this error Grant falls in line with previous Smithsonian authors who all erroneously claimed Lilienthal’s lift data were wrong and the cause of the Wrights’ trouble. So this falsehood lives on in almost every accounting of the Wrights’ work.

To his credit, Grant points out on page 26 that a 30-mph headwind would “help the Wright Flyer get off of the ground.” I have never seen that pointed out anywhere other than in articles in this blog and in The WRight Story. Actually, without the 25-knot headwind there would have been absolutely no flying by the Wrights in 1903. In fact, Wright aircraft were not capable of taking off without a strong headwind or the catapult (shown to them by Chanute) until 1910. This is important since Orville repeatedly stressed in every written statement that the 1903 Flyer “took off under its own power alone.” In fact, the headwind supplied over 90% of the necessary takeoff airspeed of the Flyer. It’s even more sobering to realize that all airplanes created by others could indeed “take off under their own power alone” without significant headwinds years before Wright airplanes could.

Further on page 26 he quotes the last flight on December 17^th as covering 852 feet in 59 seconds as reported by the Wrights. However the September 2002 issue of World War I Aeronautics included Carroll Gray’s analysis of the photo that Orville Wright labeled as the end of the “fourth flight.” Gray determined the aircraft to be only 250 feet from the end of the launch rail. The November 2019 posting of this blog presented a mensuration by this intelligence analyst of the same photo using professional techniques which determined it to be 277 feet from the launch rail. Two other careful analyses of the photo using totally different methodologies yielded numbers between those two distances.

Two witnesses’ descriptions (made decades later) off the flights of 1903 were of no help in verifying the Wrights’ distance claim. One offered no distance, and the other said it went "a half mile."

On page 27 Grant says the 1903 aircraft was fitted with two vertical tails which “they hoped would prevent the machine from going out of control in banked turns.” Again, the Wrights never attempted to make turns in 1903. The dual rudders were to perform the same function that the single moveable rudder performed on the 1902 glider. That was to enable the aircraft to correct an inadvertent roll without losing its heading or spinning into the ground.

The original fixed vertical stabilizers of 1902 didn’t work. The moveable rudders did keep the wing warping from changing the vehicle’s heading, but they were not given enough movement to swing it into a turn. This was fine for the Wrights who were never trying to turn at Kitty Hawk. They finally had to disconnect the rudders from wing warping in 1905 so they could turn them a little to correct warp induced heading changes, or turn them more to swing the aircraft into a turn and back out to level flight.

Further along on page 27 Grant says the Wrights’ “propeller design….forced the brothers to tackle…theoretical physics and math.” It’s not clear what “theoretical physics” he had in mind. Having designed a propeller himself in 1960, this author knows of no theoretical physics being involved. Merely the aerodynamics of a cambered wing and the mathematics of twisting the blades to achieve the proper angles of attack as the blades progressed outward from the hub, this according to the cruise airspeed, rpm at cruise power, and the acceleration of the incoming air.

Page 28 shows a photo of one of the Wrights’ falling weight catapults, but as always with a Smithsonian product, absolutely no credit is given to Octave Chanute for giving the concept, design, and photos to the Wrights in a letter of July 29^th, 1902. He got the design from Albert Merrill, a member of the Boston Gliding Society. But as with so many things the Wrights got from Chanute and his friends, Smithsonian products allow the readers to assume the catapult was merely another product of the Wrights’ “genius”.

Later, on the same page, he writes “Between 1903 and 1908 the Wrights developed their original Flyer into a more robust and powerful machine, without making any fundamental changes to its configuration or control systems.” Actually, that development occurred in 1904 and 1905 during testing at Huffman Prairie just east of Dayton, Ohio. The 1908 Flyers demonstrated at Ft Myer and Europe were essentially identical to the October, 1905 Flier. In fact, the 1908 vehicle tested at Kitty Hawk before public demonstrations was actually the 1905 machine with a second seat and new engine.

Although there were numerous changes to the airframe during testing in 1904 and ’05, it’s true that the Wrights made no fundamental changes to the configuration. While the vehicle still had instabilities, the Wrights wanted to show the world that their 1903 machine was indeed a valid design deserving of its reputation as the first manned, powered, “controlled” airplane.

They also knew numerous competitors were developing airplanes, and they desperately wanted to capitalize financially on their invention and reputation before any superior competition became available. That’s almost certainly why they never took the time to develop a better stable configuration. Unfortunately that decision was to cost them dearly within a few years.

But it’s not true that no fundamental changes were made to the control systems. They had to add another control separating the rudder from the warping control in order to successfully both control roll and accomplish turns in 1905. This may seem like a minor thing to Grant, but the Wrights certainly didn’t see it that way. The connected controls were the major feature of their 1906 patent and led to the patent battles they had with others in the U.S. and Europe.

 

The 1906 patent

They vigorously defended the use of a rudder with roll controls even though they already had disconnected it from wing warping. They sued foreigners that came to America to make flight demonstrations, and tried to sue some of them in their own countries. They vigorously sued Glenn Curtiss claiming he used his separate rudders when he banked to turn. In fact, they even tried to sue the U.S. Army for buying Curtiss airplanes. 

Some believe the Wrights were responsible for suppressing not only aircraft manufacturing in the United States, but also aviation research and progress of all kinds since there was no market or support for aviation research in academia or elsewhere in America due to the litigations. There is no question that at the start of World War One, while the major European countries each had hundreds of militarily capable airplanes, the United States had but a handful of aircraft incapable of combat. The U.S. Government actually had to force a halt to these litigations in order to get wartime aviation development and manufacture going.

So although Grant and the Smithsonian may think the Wrights’ changes to their controls were not significant, they actually sued much of the aviation world and crippled the aviation industry in their own home country over the very system they abandoned.

On page 30 he makes another statement that the Smithsonian, and indeed all writers and spokesmen believe must be correct; that the Wrights only contacted foreign governments about aircraft sales after being rejected by the U.S. government. Records of the Wrights’ correspondence shows that on the 18^th of January, 1905 Wilbur wrote a letter to the Dayton area Congressional Representative for forwarding through the President to the U.S. War Department proposing the sale of Wright aircraft to the U.S. military. But the records also show that over a week before that he sent a letter to his British army contact proposing the same thing. Later that year he contacted the French government before negotiations with the U.S. were completely over.

Orville Wright may well have been responsible for generating the myth of their not contacting foreign governments until after rejection by the U.S. In any case, no one seems willing to take the chance of finding out the truth and saying so.

Finally Grant closes the section on the Wrights by writing that Glenn Curtiss was the first to do a public demonstration of an airplane in the United States, and that by 1914 he was the leading producer of aircraft in the U.S. This true statement quietly slipped in at the end of the segment on the Wrights has tremendous significance to the whole Wright story and begs further discussion. 

 

Glenn Curtiss did the first public demonstration of airplane flight

If they were the first, and possessors of such inventive genius and such a burning desire to cash in on their invention, and having shocked the world with their exceptional capability in 1908, why did they fall behind their competition so quickly? No doubt Wilbur’s death in 1912 slowed progress. Maybe they got bogged down in legal battles. Or was it some mistake early on, like a penchant for isolation and secrecy, or their refusal to change an unstable configuration? Crashes and deaths gave their airplanes the reputation of being dangerous. Perhaps it was insufficient original research on cambered wing characteristics that led to their adoption of the tricky canard pitch control.

Any one of these could have been a setback. But more likely their lack of greater commercial success was a combination of a number of these reasons. Although Wilbur died an early death before their company’s failure, Orville went on another 36 years to die a multi-millionaire having flown on a four-engined, pressurized, commercial airliner and having witnessed the advent of the jet age and supersonic flight.

Conclusion

The Smithsonian myth of the Wrights’ ability to solve all the problems of manned powered flight with only their own innate genius is alive and well. But it’s a shame that such a respected citizen-supported institution having the reputation of a world class recorder of technological history insists on ignoring one of their biggest missteps. Even such a respected organization as the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics has apparently failed to recognize and acknowledge that the historical record of the origin of the science they represent is largely incorrect.

Ironically, the Wright brothers’ story, as it really exists, is worthy of respect and admiration. Their combination of determination, resourcefulness, largely self-taught research and mathematical abilities, excellent craftsmanship, and cautious bravery was exceptional. And their ability to constantly view and analyze their aircraft as complete systems of interacting structure, aerodynamics, propulsion, and control schemes is what led them to the success they achieved.

Nevertheless, many of us who have based our professional careers on the wealth of aviation science available a century later would like to know exactly how those two, who were key to starting the aviation industry, achieved successful results before most all of that knowledge was available. That’s actually why we persist to find and tell the truthinaviationhistory.

The Wrong Wright Story Series #5: Flying Machines on Film

The Wrong Wright Story Series #5:  

Flying Machines on Film 

By Joe Bullmer 

This is the last installment in this series of critical reviews of leading publications concerning the Wright brothers’ creation of the airplane switches from books to video productions.

 

It features what is perhaps the most prominent documentary on the subject, the centennial 2003 production by PBS, NOVA of WGBH, Boston titled The Wright Brothers' Flying Machine. Major funding was provided by the Park Foundation, Sprint, Microsoft, and the National Science Foundation, although the NSF wisely attached a disclaimer regarding the production’s content.

Throughout this discussion, echoes of the same errors found in the Smithsonian books previously addressed are evident. Consequently, although many will be mentioned here, they will generally not be covered in as much detail in this article. More information on what is true can be found in previous articles in this series, and in complete detail in this author’s book The WRight Story. It becomes obvious that the Smithsonian’s falsehoods have infected history and the minds of nearly all those interested in early aviation.

NOVA’s The Wright Brother’s Flying Machine also features Ken Hyde, proprietor of The Wright Experience at Warrenton, Virginia. With the help of Rick Young, Greg Cone, and many others, Hyde recreated Wright gliders, a 1903 “Flyer", and the 1910 Model B featured in the video. Also featured in the video are Tom Crouch, the Curator of Aeronautics of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, and John Anderson, its Aerodynamics Curator. Crouch appears in a couple dozen brief clips and Anderson in a half dozen.

Dr. Tom Crouch, PhD
Wright State University, Dayton, OH

 

Dr. John Anderson,
Aerodynamics Curator, NASM

 

The PBS centennial video begins discussion of the Wrights’ work by saying that the U.S. Weather Bureau suggested Kitty Hawk as appropriate for their tests. In fact, Octave Chanute suggested the Carolina coasts to the Wrights in the first place, and then, upon the Wrights’ request, the weather bureau provided weather records of these sites. This is the first in what will become a familiar litany of omissions and errors. 

The documentary launches off into technical matters by showing an exaggerated thick Clark-Y type airfoil with a flat bottom and hugely arched top, and mentioning the familiar sped-up flow across the top lowering its pressure and thus creating lift. This is a particularly ironic way to begin the documentary since the Wrights had no idea that this is how cambered wings create lift. They thought it was due to air smashing into the bottom of a thin cambered wing set at an angle to the airstream and pushing it up, just like the way water supports a skier. They even gave this incorrect explanation for lift in their first patent. Their correspondence reveals that the Wrights still believed this at least into 1906.

Right off the bat, Crouch authoritatively but erroneously states that the Wrights, seeing that Lilienthal’s gliders and Langley’s models flew so well, used their wing shapes as “the basis” for the wing shapes of their 1900 and ’01 glider wings. However in his 1901 speech to the Western Society of Engineers, Wilbur made it absolutely clear that they intentionally did not use Lilienthal’s arc-shaped wings. They also used only half his aspect ratio. A cursory glance at photos clearly shows the differences.

Unfortunately, NOVA falls for Crouch’s assertion, and shows Lilienthal’s circular wing curvatures with maximum cambers at their mid points. But soon thereafter, they clearly show the early glider recreations, carefully and accurately made from excellent photos, having short flat wings with only a very little camber right at the leading edges.

Next, Anderson says the Wrights “made the courageous decision” not to use Lilienthal’s data. This is followed by Crouch claiming that they couldn’t just “keep building gliders” and instead “used a much smarter approach” by deciding to build a wind tunnel. He goes on saying that building the tunnels themselves was fairly simple, but the measuring balances “illustrate the Wrights’ genius”. NOVA puts icing on the cake by claiming that “the balances are one of the most important experimental devices in the history of technology.”

In one minute, this trifecta of screw-ups illustrates how Smithsonian falsehoods have infected subsequent historians. It seems that rather than doing their own research, newcomers just search their vocabularies for unique ways of telling the same tales.

As stated in previous reviews, the Wrights made absolutely no mention of a wind tunnel until Chanute and his cohorts discussed the subject with them during the summer of 1901 at Kitty Hawk. They showed the Wrights photos of wind tunnels, straightening vanes, and the balance scheme for measuring lift vs drag of a wing section. (Of course, a straight smooth flow of air and a device to measure forces on test items are the two primary elements of any wind tunnel.) Armed with this information, the Wrights then built a tunnel at their first opportunity upon their return to Dayton.

The Smithsonian’s errors continue with Crouch reiterating that Lilienthal’s wing shapes were the basis for the Wrights’ 1900 and ’01 wings. The NOVA narrator immediately follows with the “Wrights built their first wings with the same cross sections that Lilienthal had used.” Both falsehoods are yet again immediately contradicted by more clips showing the nearly flat wings of the 1900 glider recreation made from close study of photos of the original vehicle.  

A Lilienthal glider replica. Note the wing shape.

From NOVA

 

Next, diagrams are shown indicating that, from the tunnel data, the Wrights moved their maximum camber from the 50% chord point forward to the 25% point for the 1902 glider. In fact, they moved it from just after the leading edge back to about the 30% point. This tortured subject is topped off with a strange statement by Crouch that “modern engineers with multi-million-dollar wind tunnels” get results “within one or two percent” of the wing profile determined by the Wrights. Things get even weirder in the next clip showing what appears to be the post-wind-tunnel 1902 wing camber curvatures on a 1900/1901 glider, something that never happened.

About 17 minutes into the 54-minute video, Crouch asserts that “The Wrights’ recognition of the fact that the control issue would be critical set them apart from virtually everyone else.” This is yet another idea that first came from Chanute in both his book -- which the Wrights obtained in 1899 --and his later correspondence with them.

Both Crouch and NOVA then excuse the instability of the Wright airplanes by explaining that, as builders and purveyors of unstable bicycles, they were unconcerned about not having “automatic stability” in their flying machines. Yet another often repeated failure of research.

 

In his 1920 sworn affidavit for the Montgomery case, Orville wrote “Our elevator was placed in front of the surfaces with the idea of producing inherent stability fore and aft, which it should have done had the travel of the center of pressure been forward [with decreasing angle of attack] as we had been led to believe.”

 

This error is followed by Crouch repeating another one by again implying that the Wrights were the first to devise wing warping. Then clips are shown of the Hyde/Young recreation of the 1902 glider with two vertical panels aft. This is particularly amusing since those twin panels were fixed and made the early ’02 glider, in the Wrights’ words, "the most dangerous vehicle yet," nearly unflyable.

They quickly replaced the fixed dual stabilizers with one moveable aft vertical rudder to counteract warp-induced yaw. That successful glider was flown that way for the rest or the test session. Perhaps Hyde or someone thought the twin rudders were a better-looking match to the biplane wings.

(Speaking of configuration errors, I have seen a model of a proposed multi-million-dollar memorial to the Wright brothers planned to be located near Dayton at the intersections of interstate highways 70 and 75. It features a gleaming stainless-steel Wright aircraft purported to be the 1905 Flyer III on a huge pedestal nearly 200 feet tall. But so far, the proposals feature an aircraft with no engine or propellers. Wouldn’t it be ironic to expend all that effort to gather many millions of dollars for a nearly 200-foot-high stainless-steel Wright memorial for millions to see every month, and then show something that never existed, particularly when a correct detailed recreation of the powered Flyer III resides in a museum on the other side of town? Worst yet, with no propulsion, the memorial vehicle would look more like their first 1902 glider, a vehicle the Wrights claimed was their worst, nearly unflyable, and which they quickly reconfigured.)

Moving on into propeller design, all the standard blunders on this subject appear. After showing Hyde carefully measuring original Wright propellers at the Franklin Institute, Crouch once more marvels at the Wrights’ realization that a propeller should be just a rotating wing, and that this “underscores the nature of their genius”. Then NOVA joins the cheering by proclaiming “the Wrights solved the fundamental riddle of propeller design.”

(This can be seen on page 162 of Lorenz and Herweg’s 1976 edition of Chanute’s book.) 

 

Unfortunately, the Wrights did just the opposite, making their propellers wider toward the tips. Although somewhat helpful in developing thrust with very low-speed props, this caused excessive stress loading there. This stress may have contributed to the failure of a propeller at Ft. Myer in 1908 causing the crash that injured Orville’s back and killed Lt. Thomas Selfridge.

About 25 and a half minutes into the video NOVA does a completely bungled foray into Langley’s Aerodrome testing. They show the photos of both separate attempts while claiming there was just one attempt, and in that one the aircraft went up 60 feet, then down, and then broke up before falling into the river, a description that’s not even close to what actually happened. It is well known that there were two attempts to fly Langley’s manned airplane. Photos clearly shown two completely different failures, the aircraft not gaining altitude in either attempt.

Next Crouch zips quickly through the 1903 tests at Kitty Hawk, giving the distances and times claimed for Orville’s first and Wilbur’s last attempts on the 17th of December. He then claims that was “the day that changed history.” Not content, NOVA jumps in claiming that within one year after that the Wrights built an aircraft that could fly for 30 minutes. It was actually two years before they accomplished that with a substantially modified aircraft.

NOVA next covers Wilbur’s successful demonstrations in Europe without mentioning Orville’s demonstrations at Ft, Myer that included the crash due to propeller failure that killed Lt. Tom Selfridge. They then show the photo of the first Wright factory at Dayton without noting that, in order to sell airplanes, for their Model B they had to abandon the canard elevator, the patented coordinated control, the catapult, and eventually on a later model, even wing warping. They also don’t mention that the company basically failed within six years and was eventually merged with the Martin company.

Thirty-three minutes into the 54-minute video, the focus changes to Ken Hyde’s ill-fated attempt to build and fly an accurate reproduction of the Wright Model B. He is shown measuring the authentic Model B at the Franklin Institute, using the same type of thread to weave fabric, and the same aluminum stain on the wood struts.

Constructing the replica

He even found an original Wright Model B engine in California, brought it back to his facility at Warrenton, Virginia, and rebuilt it. Creating this exact replica and getting it to flying condition took a team over ten years and required funding of seven figures by donors including the Northrup-Grumman and Curtiss-Wright Corporations.

While showing roll-out of the B replica, Crouch mentions that most of the Wright-trained exhibition pilots were killed in them. Ken follows that by courageously saying one must take chances to fly one, and you had to be brave to attempt it. He then makes the prophetic statement that most pilots of B’s were killed due to confusion and miss-use of the flight controls. He planned to avoid this fate by practicing on a specially programmed simulator. Ironically, he mentions the simulation showed the aircraft had a tendency to side slip when moderately banked.

They first measure the thrust available and find it adequate at over 160 pounds. Ken then attempts a taxi test but starts at mid-field due to storms having created bumpy soggy conditions on half of it. He gets more acceleration than expected, a problem on an aircraft with no brakes. He is heading for trees protruding out into the field, but instead of cutting power, turning away, and using a nearby ditch to stop the vehicle, Ken inexplicably elects to lift off and attempt to fly over the nearby tree tops.

The glider lifting off

While over the trees, he tries a shallow turn to the left in an attempt to return to the flying field, but the aircraft starts slipping to the left and losing altitude. Ken recovers but tries the same maneuver again while still barely over the tree tops. Of course, the same thing happens, but this time he sideslips into the trees. In seconds, ten years of work by whole teams, along with millions of dollars, was turned into a pile of junk. 

The crashed glider

 

Ken’s senior assistant, Greg Cone, sounds really disgusted. After getting the airplane out of the trees and seeing that the engine, one of only two original Wright engines in existence, is busted up, and the airframe demolished, Cone sounds ready to quit. (Apparently, he didn’t.) Ken, who suffered injuries, says they will need a lot more money, and (interestingly) some engineers, to try it again. But perhaps finding out that Hyde demolished the plane within a few seconds of taking off when he wasn’t even supposed to leave the ground soured the confidence of his financial backers. A second try has never been made.

Hyde astutely concludes his comments by saying that avoiding accidents “was not thought out that well.” Then he paraphrases a Wright quote, to wit, “you’ve got to fly to learn.” Maybe, but at least the Wrights had more sense than to try to maneuver while skimming over a bunch of trees on what was supposed to be a first taxi test. Certainly, busting up million-dollar airplanes within ten seconds of takeoff, after a decade of work, is not what the Wright brothers had in mind.

The 54-minute video is concluded without mentioning Hyde’s 1903 reproduction that failed to lift off of the ground in front of over a thousand onlookers at the Wright centennial ceremonies at Kitty Hawk in 2003. Apparently no one involved had a sufficient appreciation of the vehicle’s need for a strong headwind to lift it.

The quality of the NOVA production was of course doomed by relying on Smithsonian officials for technical and historical accuracy. This may be of minor concern for a TV production. As long as they have good video and authoritative sounding narratives, most producers seem happy. But unfortunately, it casts doubt among knowledgeable people about the veracity of other NOVA productions. It also provides yet another illustration of how the virus of faulty Smithsonian research infects the products of others innocently relying on their information.

Smithsonian Air and Space Museum personnel are not the only ones who rely on their, or their organizations, reputations to compensate for lack of knowledge of the subject, or diligent research. An excellent recent example of this is the 2015 book The Wright Brothers by two-time Pulitzer Prize winning author David McCullough.

I have not read the book, but have heard radio interviews and seen TV interviews of McCullough, and talks by him to promote the New York Times bestselling book. His degree of incorrect knowledge on this subject is surprising. Nonetheless, his book will undoubtedly sell well and become another source of errors in future works.

(As you read further, please keep in mind that the following was written over a year before David McCullough died. He was well respected and loved as a historian. However, his recent death does not change history or the inaccuracy of his account of the Wright brothers or their work.)

In a talk to the Massachusetts Historical Society, McCullouch made the following incorrect or misleading statements:

• “Everybody knew man couldn’t fly.” Actually, many newspapers and magazines had been showing for years that many, using unpowered gliders, had already flown over a thousand times.
• There was only one Aerodrome flight attempt that went up 60 feet and then dove into the water. In fact, there were two attempts. Both went down immediately after leaving the launcher, the aircraft not gaining ten feet.
• The Wrights designed their airplanes by watching birds. Although Wilbur alluded to birds bending their wing tips, Orville said he knew of nothing they got from birds.
• Mouillard’s book convinced the Wrights that “riding the wind” was the secret to birds’ soaring flight. McCullough evidently doesn’t know about thermals or updrafts due to surface features. The Wrights always knew power was necessary for the sustained flight of an airplane.
• He relates how their sister Katherine took care of Orville after his crash. However, he says nothing about Orville disowning her for "deserting" him when, after working with him for 18 years, she finally married.
• The Wrights created their wind tunnel and, with it, developed the first correct information. In fact, they were informed about wind tunnels and shown designs for their components and measuring devices by Octave Chanute and his cohorts Ed Huffaker and George Spratt. They subsequently built a tunnel and found that Lilienthal’s data, which he had published 13 years earlier, had been absolutely correct. The Wrights had just applied it to totally inappropriate wing shapes. They admitted all this in a November 24th, 1901 letter to Chanute.

Ken Burns and David McCullough

In 2015, documentarian Ken Burns interviewed McCullough on TV. During that hour-long interview:

• McCullough said “Wilbur was unquestionably a genius”. This may be easy to believe when you don’t understand the science or what Wilbur did, and are unaware of how much he got from others.
• Both McCullough and Burns had Lilienthal’s and Wrights’ wing cambers completely confused.
• In McCullough’s discussion of Wilbur’s and Orville’s personalities and intellectual differences he again had the names mixed up and was somewhat incoherent.
• He again said irrelevant things about “riding the wind”.
• Burns repeated numerous erroneous things he had read in McCullough’s book.
• Again, McCullough discusses Kate, omitting Orville’s disownment of her when she got married.

McCullough says the Wrights would never blame others for failures or attack competitors. In fact, they blamed others for their having the wrong concept of center of pressure movements, for having inadequate lift, for Wilbur’s fatal sickness, plus a number of other things. They attacked Henson, Stringfellow, Marriott, and others as having made no contributions to aviation, called Langley’s successful powered unmanned aircraft “toys”, sued many others in aviation, and even used the courts to try to throw foreign aviators out of America. Not long before Chanute’s death they turned on even him, a man without whose help, as we have seen in these earlier critiques, they may well not have been successful.

They occasionally even belligerently blamed each other for things. Wilbur repeatedly berated Orville’s business acumen, and blamed him for inadequate workmanship and packing when the aircraft Orville sent to France arrived damaged from customs inspections. In interviews for Kelly’s book, Orville blamed Wilbur for their incorrect concept of movement of the center of lift on a cambered wing.

The last flight in 1903 by Wilbur was the only trial that they, at that time, claimed had met their 300-foot criteria for a successful flight. However, after Wilbur’s death, Orville claimed he had made the first successful flight by adding the 27 mile per hour, 12-second wind speed distance to his 120-foot estimated ground distance to claim 570 feet “through the air”.


Summary

This concludes this series of critique articles. In spite of a fairly cordial discussion over ten years ago with the authors of the Smithsonian books discussed in these articles, there has been no subsequent interest expressed by them, or anyone else in the Smithsonian organization, in resolving any of these issues. On the contrary, recently the Institute proudly placed its name on the cover of Flight – The Complete History of Aviation, a book that repeats some of the most egregious long-standing Smithsonian falsehoods concerning the Wrights’ testing.

Cordial approaches to NOVA and PBS documentary producers have likewise elicited no responses. Apparently these authors and producers also intend to continue to enjoy success and royalties with little regard for the truth, arrogantly expecting it to quietly fade away and leave their reputations, incomes, and integrity intact. They probably think they did a noble thing, aggrandizing the Wrights’ by crediting their accomplishments to amazing inspirations of genius. However, in fact the Smithsonian has dishonored itself and its contributors, the Wrights, and particularly their advisors, by falsifying the story of what many consider the creation of the manned, powered, controlled airplane.

The NOVA producers, along with David McCullough, have provided examples of how the books reviewed in the first four articles of this series have infected aviation history. Even someone as well-intentioned and respected as Ken Burns was duped by McCullough’s interpretation of the Smithsonian fantasy. This author would have welcomed an opportunity to meet with Mr. McCullough and show him original source material, but unfortunately he died before this was published. While I respect his intentions, McCullough’s death does not change history nor the dangers of using Smithsonian books or information as source material.

The author of these articles and The WRight Story remains available to participate in open recorded discussions or debate with Smithsonian personnel, or any others in a position to resolve any of the issues raised in any of these five articles, in order to establish truth in aviation history.

-- Joe Bullmer