On This Day in American History
Today marks the 106th anniversary of powered heavier than air flight. Orville and Wilbur Wright, after many years of experimentation, finally slipped the surly bonds of Earth on that day, when they successfully flew their invention four times from the sands of Kill Devil Hills at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
Clickable image: The Wright Flyer lifting off the launch rail 106 years ago.
I managed to travel to Kitty Hawk in 1993 to visit the place where it all started on the 90th year following the historic events. As a pilot and flight instructor, I took special interest in the Wright Brothers. On another trip to the Washington, D.C. area, I visited the Flyer and the Vin Fiz in their permanent exhibits in the Smithsonian Institute’s National Air and Space Museum. I have some old VHS-C footage of Kitty Hawk and the Smithsonian around here somewhere, but no way to play VHS any more. It’s too bad that You Tube hadn’t been invented back then.
From WikiPedia:
The Wright Flyer (often retrospectively referred to as Flyer I, 1903 Flyer and occasionally Kitty Hawk) was the first powered aircraft designed and built by the Wright brothers. The flight of the Wright Flyer is recognized by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, the standard setting and record-keeping body for aeronautics and astronautics, as “the first sustained and controlled heavier-than-air powered flight”. [more]
2 Responses to “On This Day in American History”
DirtCrashr on 20 Dec 2009 at 1531 #
Thank you for that reminder - I don’t recall seeing it on Google.
Minstrel on 21 Dec 2009 at 0740 #
Google seems to have their anti-American hat on these days.
December 17th is also the anniversary of my parents wedding (1938).