We Got This. (They Didn‘t, Really.)

It's important to remember, before and for a time after the Wrights launched down their sandy path, that how people perceived flying and what its future might be were far different from how we understand it today. There were no Federal Aviation Regulations (FARs), no FAA to guide development. No concept of shared airspace. Even those in the midst of the discovery did not yet comprehend the challenges of flight that every private pilot applicant today knows by rote and, soon thereafter, through experience. Remember, too, that aviation had been an experimental field for well more than a century at the time of Wrights.

That was perhaps the biggest takeaway. The pioneers of flight were beginning to understand how difficult it was to get a powered airplane even briefly into the sky and how life-threatening a proposition that was. A big part of the problem was how little even the flighterati understood the nature of aerodynamics and the ways in which flight controls might be designed and manufactured to address those physical realities. Volumes could be written about the struggles these designers had in even wrapping their heads around something that even moderately knowledgeable aviation types today see as the simple concept of aerodynamic stability.

Those early aircraft were outrageously difficult to fly. How so? Think of flying a modern plane loaded far beyond the aft CG with the wings loosely bolted on and at 5% power. Then remember that the structures of those fledgling craft posed more hazard to the pilot in a crash than they did protection. One model of an early Wright Flyer barely did what its name promised. The Wrights built eight Model C aircraft for the military, six of which crashed with fatal results. It would take about two decades for aircraft designers even to begin to build aircraft that were flyable by a less than highly skilled pilot with a bit of luck that day. It would take even longer to where flyable aircraft could be made sufficiently durable, reliable and affordable that they would resemble products an average person might buy and operate.

So the sense that we have, that the creation of a personal flying segment was a given, ignores the fact that creating aircraft good enough to support such a structure was a staggeringly difficult endeavor, one whose outcome was, for decades, in doubt.

Five Things That Pilots Got Wrong

J BeckettWriter