Authors: Tom D. Crouch
The Bishop's Boys (32 page)
Work on the hangar for the new glider began on Monday, July 15, and continued for three days. Orv thought it “a grand institution, with awnings at both ends; that is, with big doors hinged at the top, which
we swing open and prop up, making an awning the full length of the building at each end….”
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Huffaker arrived in camp the following Thursday, “and with him a swarm of mosquitoes which came in a mighty cloud, almost darkening the sun.” That, Orville added,
was the beginning of the most miserable existence I have ever passed through. The agonies of typhoid fever with its attending starvation are as nothing in comparison. But there was no escape. The sand and grass and trees and hills and everything were crawling with them. They chewed us clean through our underwear and socks. Lumps began swelling up all over my body like hen’s eggs. We attempted to escape by going to bed, which we did at a little after five o’clock. We put our cots out under the awnings and wrapped up in our blankets with only our noses protruding from the folds…. The wind, which until now had been blowing over twenty miles an hour, dropped off entirely. Our blankets then became unbearable. The perspiration would roll off us in torrents. We would partly uncover and the mosquitoes would swoop down upon us in vast multitudes.
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The following night, the three campers set up their beds in the open air beneath wooden frames supporting mosquito netting. At first all went well. “But what was our astonishment when in a few minutes we heard a terrific slap and a cry from Mr. Huffaker announcing that the enemy had gained the outer works and he was engaged in a hand-to-hand conflict with them. All our forces were put to complete rout.”
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The campers finally stumbled upon the expedient of burning old tree stumps, collected from a sand hollow a quarter of a mile from camp, to drive off the mosquitoes. Spratt, who arrived in camp on the evening of July 25, dragged his bedding out into the open, but returned a few minutes later, agreeing that the smoke was preferable to the mosquitoes. Wilbur wrote to Chanute on July 26, hoping to catch him before he left for Kitty Hawk—“You should by all means bring with you from the North eight yards of the finest meshed mosquito bar you can find. Except for the mosquitoes, our camp life has been pleasant but exciting at times.”
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They finished the glider on July 26. Between the mosquitoes and the midday heat, it had not been an easy task.
They made seventeen glides on Saturday, July 27. As in 1900, Wilbur was the sole pilot. Problems were apparent from the outset. The first flight ended with a quick nose down into the sand. With each trial,
Wilbur moved a few inches more to the rear, attempting to shift the center of gravity farther back and bring the nose up.
They returned to Kitty Hawk with a new machine in 1901. As in 1900, Wilbur did all the flying. Bill (left) and Dan Tate (right) helped to launch him into the air.
The craft remained in the air, but Wilbur, forced to stretch his arm far forward to the control, found that full up or down elevator was still required to maintain command of the machine. “In the 1900 machine,” he would later explain, “one fourth as much rudder [elevator] action had been sufficient to give much better control.”
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Time after time the glider flew an undulating pattern, as Wilbur struggled to maintain an even keel. Twice it climbed rapidly out of control, then stalled, or stopped dead in the air. Screams from the ground sent the pilot scooting rapidly forward toward the leading edge. To everyone’s relief, the glider pancaked straight down from an altitude of twenty feet, landing without injury to pilot or machine.
The forward elevator, they realized, had saved the day. That expanse of surface out in front of the main wing had prevented the glider from nosing over or falling off on one wing. It happened again a few minutes later. This time the machine had even begun to fall backward before Will brought the nose down sufficiently to flutter safely back to earth.
This early indication that the forward elevator would help to keep the nose up in a stall was encouraging, but the basic problem remained. As Orv explained to Katharine, “this is precisely the fix Lilienthal got into when he was killed.” For the first time since they had begun their experiments, the brothers were genuinely frightened.
Huffaker, whose aeronautical experience had been limited to some work on the Langley models in 1896, failed to recognize the danger, and regarded their work as an overwhelming success. He was particularly impressed by a long glide of 315 feet in 19 seconds, which he thought was probably the best anyone had ever made. “We think,” Orv noted, “that at least three or four better have been made before.”
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Pitch control was the problem. Wilbur found it impossible not to overcontrol. They reduced the size of the elevator to 10 square feet, reducing the lift at the forward end of the machine and making the elevator a bit less sensitive. It did not help. As in 1900, they decided to pause and gather a full range of data while flying the glider as an unmanned kite before risking any further damage to craft or pilot.
The results were not encouraging. Total lift remained only one third of that predicted by the Lilienthal tables, and the angle of attack was still much higher than expected. Empty, the machine would not kite at an angle as low as 3 or 4 degrees in a wind of less than 23 to 25 miles per hour. Wilbur recorded their disappointment: “As we had expected to devote a major portion of our time to experimenting in an 18-mile wind without much motion of the machine, we find that our hopes of obtaining actual practice in the air reduced to about one-fifth of what we hoped, as now it is necessary to glide in order to get sustaining speed. Five minutes practice in free flight is a good day’s record. We have not yet reached so good an average as this even.”
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Although they had not fully tested the controls, it was apparent that the 1901 machine was less responsive than its predecessor. The brothers attributed this to the deeper camber of the 1901 wing, over which the center of pressure might move more slowly. They were also afraid that the center of pressure was reversing directions at small angles of attack.
That was the heart of the control problem: How to govern the movement of the center of pressure around the center of gravity. The two points coincided when the airplane was flying straight forward in a balanced condition. The elevator and wing-warping controls enabled the pilot to alter the position of the center of pressure to restore balance or to maneuver.
The Wrights had concluded that the airstream striking the upper surface of the deeply curved wings of 1901 not only increased resistance but caused an unexpected reversal of travel of the center of pressure. To confirm their suspicions, they removed the upper wing and kited it separately. At relatively low wind velocities the surface soared high overhead at a steep angle of attack. As the wind velocity increased, the angle of attack decreased and the pull of the kite line approached the horizontal. Finally, in very high winds of over 25 miles per hour, the wing nosed down at a negative angle, forcing the brothers to pull it up off the sand with the tether ropes.
Their fears were confirmed. The deep camber of 1 in 12 was leading to a reversal of the center of pressure at low angles of attack, a condition that created the unexpected pitch problems. In addition, a comparison with the drift measurements made in 1900 showed that the new craft had much greater head resistance. Late in July the Wrights ceased testing and remodeled the machine to correct the defects. They reshaped the leading edge spar and added a new spar near the midpoint of each wing supporting a series of short uprights that were used to truss the ribs into a much shallower camber.
Huffaker had scarcely given a thought to his own machine. His attempts to fly were so pathetic that he had given up early on, abandoning the tattered remnants of the Chanute-Huffaker glider to deteriorate slowly in the sand.
By the time Chanute finally arrived in camp on August 5, Huffaker was brimming over with enthusiasm for the Wrights and their glider. “He is astonished at our mechanical facility,” Wilbur noted, “and, as he attributes his own failures to the lack of this, he thinks the problem solved when these difficulties are overcome, while we expect to find further difficulties of a theoretical nature which must be met by new mechanical designs.”
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Very soon after putting the rebuilt machine back into service on August 8, the Wrights tried a new means of launching the glider, kiting it up to an altitude of twenty or thirty feet in a wind of 17 to 20 miles per hour, then cutting loose to glide back to earth. In this way they hoped to make repeated flights from the sand flats, and avoid the time-consuming drudgery of carrying the craft back uphill after every flight. In practice, however, the machine kited at far too steep an angle for launching a glide.
Reduced to gliding, they were pleasantly surprised to find that Wilbur was able to stretch his distance through the air to 389 feet after only a few trials. More important, the reduction in camber had solved the pitch problem. “The machine with its new curvature never failed to respond promptly to even the smallest movements of the rudder [elevator]. The operator could cause it to almost skim the ground, following the undulations of its surface, or he could cause it to sail out almost on a level with the starting point, and passing high above the foot of the hill, gradually settle down to the ground.”
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With the pitch control problem solved, the brothers loosened the warping cables for the first time. The foot control of 1900 was replaced by a cradle to which the warping wires were attached. When one wingtip dropped, the pilot would shift his hips, which rested in the cradle, to the high side, restoring balance. The Wrights expected the system to work perfectly, giving them an opportunity to make their first long glides under complete control. Instead, they found themselves, in Wilbur’s words, “completely nonplused.” They had stumbled across the edge of the most intractable of all their theoretical difficulties. If warping was applied for only a short time, they could maintain balance and make their way downhill. When prolonged warping was induced in an effort to turn, things began to fall rapidly apart.
It was a very difficult thing to put your finger on, as Wilbur later explained. “To the person who has never attempted to control an uncontrollable flying machine in the air, this may seem somewhat strange, but the operator on the machine is so busy manipulating his rudder [elevator] and looking for a soft place to alight, that his ideas of what actually happens are very hazy.”
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He described it as “a peculiar feeling of instability.”
Wilbur sensed that the machine was turning, skidding really, toward the wing that presented the most surface to the air. Whatever was happening, it was dangerous. Skimming close to the ground on August 9, the left tip dropped and Wilbur shifted to his right. The craft immediately darted into the sand, throwing him forward through the elevator. The forward surface was badly damaged, and Will suffered facial cuts and bruises.
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Chanute left for home on August 11, as the Wrights continued to struggle with the new problem. They returned to unmanned kite tests, loading the machine with sandbags and trying to operate the wing-warping mechanism from the ground. The tests confirmed the existence of the problem, but offered no solutions.
There were a few more free glides on August 15 and 16, but the uncertainty was taking its toll. All of the flights were less than 200 feet in length. Rain had set in, and there seemed little point in continuing. The company was not improving, either. Spratt left camp soon after Chanute. To their surprise, the Wrights liked him. He had a sense of humor, and knew every plant and animal on the Outer Banks. Moreover, Wilbur felt a personal kinship with this man who was struggling with some of the problems he himself had overcome not so many years before.
Huffaker, on the other hand, was priggish, lazy, and given to borrowing personal articles without so much as a by your leave. Will thought Huffaker looked a bit sheepish when he finally left camp. He attributed it to the fact that the Tennessee man was still wearing a shirt he had put on soon after his arrival. “Well,” he remarked to Spratt, “some things are rather more amusing to think about than to endure at the time.”
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The Wrights left Kitty Hawk early on August 22. The atmosphere was very different from their departure the year before. In 1900, while the experiments had not gone exactly as expected, there had been some cause for enthusiasm and much reason for hope. Now they could see only problems. The steps taken to increase the lift of their first machine had failed dismally. They could not understand what was wrong, but they had begun to suspect that there was a fundamental problem with the information they had inherited from Lilienthal and others.
The new difficulty with lateral control was even more disturbing. The Wrights had expected to encounter a great many additional problems, but not with their wing-warping system. They had been absolutely certain of their success in that area. The realization that there was some mysterious problem with the warping mechanism was the worst blow.