How to Fly in 4 Steps, The Wright Brothers Way!
The Wright Brothers are one of the reasons why we have planes in the air and have technology in space. The drive they had to be great in life has proven that they were the best entrepreneurs in the world. They didn’t really have much given to them. They were a low-income family. The brothers both loved to read and enjoy family time. The brothers first started their entrepreneurship by opening up a printing business from their shed where they printed newspapers that they made and sold them to customers. After the printing business they opened up a bike shop at which at the time was fairly huge but not so much. They repaired broken bikes and invented new bikes as well.
The Wright brothers had gotten interested in flying when people around the world had started attempting it. So what did they do? They wrote to the Smithsonian and obtained technical papers regarding aerodynamics. They read about the works of Cayley, and Langley, and the hang-gliding flights of Otto Lilienthal. They corresponded with Octave Chanute concerning some of their ideas. They studied the problems which had been encountered by previous flyers and they talked about possible solutions to the problems. Their number one source for learning how to fly was studying large gliding birds.
The Wright Brother’s ideas for flight control were tested on unpowered aircraft's. These flying machines were called kites. The Wright Brothers were kite enthusiasts and they used the kite flights in the same way that modern engineers use wind tunnels and flight testing to try out their ideas concerning flight control. Kitty Hawk, North Carolina was chosen for their early flight experiments because its consistent high winds off the ocean are perfect for kite flying.
The wright brothers didn’t like the way the flights were turning out and didn’t meet their performance goals. They doubted that they were going to build a flying machine. They built a wind tunnel and developed model-testing techniques including a balance to more accurately determine the lift and drag of their aircraft. They tested over two hundred different wings and airfoil models to improve the performance of their gliders. Their very successful 1902 aircraft was based on their new data.
On December 17, 1903, the Wright Brothers did it. The Wright Brothers were the first to fly a controllable self-propelled, heavier than air machine on December 17, 1903. But after that they were still developing their aircraft. They weren’t pleased with it. At that time they left Kitty Hawk, North Caroline and went back home to Dayton, Ohio. With new, more powerful aircraft, they were able to stay aloft for up to a half hour, to fly figure eights, and to even take passengers up for a ride.
The Age of The Airplane Had Arrived!!!
The Wright Brothers used design thinking. They empathized on how they could make the aircraft and steps they would need to take to get there. In all the brothers could really never settle on what they wanted to do. They started out selling newspapers they had printed to opening up a bike shop for repair and for them to invent new bikes.
After that they had to ideate. They did this by writing letters to the Smithsonian for access to documents by other inventors that were pursuing the same thing. They studied birds because they were already in the air flying and then they realized that they needed somewhere that had a high wind turbulence. So that is when they moved to Kitty Hawk.
They built many prototypes for years and years till they finally got it. They started out by using kites and then going into none powered gliders. They tested different flaps and wings till they thought it was right to put in a engine.
Once they got what they were looking for, the first flight, they were accomplished but not really satisfied. They went back to their hometown and did some more prototyping and kept making their machine better and better as they years went on.
