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Americans not unique/special? OBAMA is full of krap!
"Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunwards I’ve climbed and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds – and done a thousand things
You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hovering there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air,
Up, up the long delirious burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace,
Where never lark, or even eagle, flew;
And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of god."
Awesome story!!!
That was a great area for it too.
lol Now it’s probably covered by beach houses, if they haven’t preserved it.
Only the local 2-bit newspaper covered this historic event.
The New York newspapers didn`t think it was worth anything to send a reporter down there to check on a couple of fringe element bicycle brothers/.
Soon to be erased from history books because neither were minorities, gay, cross-dressers, women, or Obama voters.
Soon to be erased from history books because neither were minorities, gay, cross-dressers, women, or Obama voters.
If anyone is ever traveling I-70 in Indiana near the OH border, take an hour and visit this little gem:
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
I was gifted to work at Wright Patterson air force base for almost twenty years including some time near Huffman Prairie. As I was going to and from I never failed to look over at the field where the first Master pilot was born. Wilbur taught himself through trial and error. He made the first 360 degree turns here and I suspect he flew into his own prop wash as I did later in my first hour of flight training. He practiced this over and over again in this small portion of the Prairie until he had mastered it, it seems flight training was born here also.
I’ve oftened wondered why the 12 second flight is always majored as what changed everything; it did, but before they quit the beach they were staying aloft for much longer periods of time. It was the event at Kitty Hawk.
The irony is that although the Wrights invented some fundamental analysis of lift and drag, and I think were the first to make a wind tunnel, they were fixated on getting that permanent patent on flight, and when others came along after them they had difficulty asserting their prior art. Their only proof of their initial flight was an article in a newspaper which they were initially unhappy was published.
Ironically, their approach to the problem of flight was quite limited, and advances by Glenn Curtis and others quickly transcended all of the Wrights’ technology. To such an extent that nothing unique to the Wrights’ design remains in use.
Basically their achievement constituted proof-of-concept which legitimated the efforts of Curtis and others. Less the beginning of flight as we know it than the end of the presumption that powered, heavier-than-air flight was not possible.
It is easy to see that powered flight only works when you have a light enough power plant generating enough power; the Wrights’ design successfully finessed the limitations of a marginally good-enough power plant. One of the ways they did it was with the twisted propeller, shaped the way you see a rubber-band powered model aircraft propeller is shaped. That milked the most thrust out of their marginal power plant for the low speed flight regime. Another such decision is their canard pitch control, which provides positive lift rather than a negative lift as in conventional horizontal tail design. It works - at low speed. Which is the only regime their engine was ever going to take them. At high speed, such a design is hopelessly unstable (in the absence of sophisticated technology to control it). The Wrights depended on being low and slow enough that the instability crashes would be survivable.
The Wrights’ achievement is impressive. But they solved the problem of flying at all, without doing much in the way of power plant development. In retrospect their design is a quaint backwater from the time when engines adequate to high and fast flight did not yet exist.
My Mother was born in 1903
Cool. I’ll dedicate today’s flight to “Kitty Hawk Day”.
And, if you are also a pilot, you will love it.
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