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STAR WALKER OF THE MONTH by – Ray Wicks "The desire to fly is an idea handed down to us by our ancestors who,
When we think of our Star Walker fighter pilots, the aircraft they zoom around in, and even the space stations they fly by, visit, or live on; it’s easy to forget where it all started. Somewhere out there, some young boy is playing with a toy spacecraft, thinking about the day he becomes a Ken Ju Kai warrior and gets to fly his very own Enoch 3 fighter. But does he know that exactly 105 years ago, man was attempting flight for the first time?
December 17th, 1903. Kitty Hawk, North Carolina Brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright stand on a windswept beach, looking at the rolling sand dunes ahead, a curiously dual winged machine sits to their left. Wilbur fiddles with his camera, a large black box on top a tripod. Adam Etheridge, John Daniels and Will Dough of the coastal lifesaving crew; area businessman W.C. Brinkley; and Johnny Moore, a boy from the village, watch with great anticipation. Orville pulls down his hat a bit tighter, climbs onto the bottom set of wings, and readies himself for history. Planting the Seed Years earlier, in 1878, when the Wright brothers were young, their father, who often traveled as a bishop in the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, brought home a toy helicopter for his two younger sons. The helicopter was made of paper, bamboo and cork with a rubber band to twirl its rotor. The boys played with the contraption until it broke. So, they decided to build their own. This was the initial spark of their interest in flying. Orville dropped out of high school after his junior year to start a printing business. Wilbur helped him build their own printing press and he became editor while Orville was publisher of the weekly newspaper the West Side News. One of their clients for printing jobs was Orville's friend and classmate in high school, Paul Dunbar, who rose to international acclaim as a ground-breaking African-American poet and writer. The printing business didn’t thrive as hoped, and thus they opened up a bicycle shop. Here they gained the mechanical skills essential for their future success by working with bicycles, motors, and other machinery. Their work with bicycles in particular influenced their belief that an unstable vehicle like a flying machine could be controlled and balanced with practice. With Their Eyes On The Skies In Dayton, Ohio, 1896, the brothers began their mechanical aeronautical experimentation, following studies on Sir George Cayley, Octave Chanute, and Leonardo da Vinci. But it wasn’t their examination of these brilliant men’s work that lent to one of the most important discoveries. It was Wilbur’s observation of birds that lead to their invention of “wing-warping”, a way to laterally control flight, consisting of a system of pulleys and cables to twist the trailing edges of the wings in opposite directions. With this new found discovery in mind, they went to work on designing a glider to put their theory to the test. After receiving a letter from the Wright brothers, Chanute advised them to travel to Kitty Hawk because that area of the Atlantic coast was known for regular breezes and would provide a soft, sandy landing surface. The spot also gave them privacy from reporters, who had turned the 1896 Chanute experiments at Lake Michigan into something of a circus.
The tests proved little about their theory since they weren’t able to man most of the runs. So they traveled back to Dayton and built a six-foot wind tunnel in their shop, where they conducted systematic tests on over 200 different miniature wings. Next, they needed an engine, if they were to fly for more than a few feet. But like a ship through water, what would push their craft through the air? They discussed and argued the question, sometimes heatedly, until they concluded that an aeronautical propeller, essentially a wing rotating in the vertical plane, would do the trick. On that basis, they used data from more wind tunnel tests to design their propellers. The finished blades were just over eight feet long, made of three laminations of glued spruce. The Wrights decided on twin "pusher" propellers (counter-rotating to cancel torque), which would act on a greater quantity of air than a single, relatively slow propeller.
The Wrights wrote to several engine manufacturers, but none would agree or have the ability or patience to work on such a light-weight engine. They then turned to their shop mechanic, Charlie Taylor, who built an engine in just six weeks in close consultation with the brothers. He built it out of aluminum, which was very rare at the time, and it featured a gravity fed gas line.
With their new engine, propeller, warped-wings, and hopes high, Orville and Wilbur set out for North Carolina one more time. December 14th, 1903 This was it. This was the moment they had been waiting for. So, who would be the first to pilot their invention and become the first to fly? After all, they both put so much work into this dream. Ultimately a coin toss, won by Wilbur, determined who would go first. Wilbur’s first attempt at flight lasted three seconds, the engine stalling after takeoff, resulting in minor damage to the “Flyer”. It was hardly a success. Three Days Later Orville looks over at Wilbur, positioned behind the camera, and nods with an apprehensive smile. The engine is fired up and the Flyer begins to roll down the hill on a short track. As the Flyer reaches the end of the track, Orville grips the controls tight, half in expectancy, the other in prayer. Suddenly, the airplane lifts off the ground and sails across the North Carolina sky. Wilbur, looking on with wonder, snaps a shot of his younger brother carrying out their dreams. His flight lasts all of 12 seconds, 120 feet (36.5 m), at a speed of only 6.8 mph over the ground, and he lands safely on the sand. The next two flights cover roughly 175 and 200 feet (60 m), by Wilbur and Orville respectively.
Wilbur starts the fourth and last flight at 12 o'clock, sharp. The first few hundred feet are up and down, as before, but by the time he reaches three hundred feet, the machine is under much better control. However, when at nearly eight hundred feet, the machine begins pitching again, and it darts downward, striking the ground. The distance over the ground is measured 852 feet (260 m); the time of the flight is 59 seconds. And surprisingly, there’s very little damage to the Flyer. The Wright Brothers: Flyers Or Liars? The Wrights sent a telegram about the flights to their father, requesting that he "inform the press." However, the Dayton Journal refused to publish the story, saying the flights were too short to be important, a mistake the newspaper would later regret. In 1904 the Wrights built the Flyer II. Instead of paying for the expensive trip to North Carolina, they instead set up their next tests in a cow pasture just northeast of Dayton. It was there that they invited reporters to witness their flight attempts on the condition that no photographs be taken, as they were paranoid about competitors stealing their ideas, especially since they didn’t have a patent, yet. Weather conditions prevented the Wrights from having any successful flights, and the reporters went home disappointed and disbelieving. Lack of government funding and a patent, led to their efforts to be even more secretive about their project, and allowed no viewings of their 105 flights over the next year and a half. The only photos of these flights were taken by the brothers. Despite progress, they scrapped the much-repaired Flyer II and build the Flyer III with new modifications. These proved to be very useful and the Wrights greatly increased their flight times and distances. Wilbur made a flight of 24.5 miles (39.4 km) in 38 minutes and 3 seconds, ending with a safe landing when the fuel ran out. Reporters showed up the next day, but the brothers refused to fly.
As a result, the news was not widely known outside of Ohio, and was often met with skepticism. The Paris edition of the Herald Tribune headlined a 1906 article on the Wrights "FLYERS OR LIARS?" From then on, they refused to fly anywhere unless they had a firm contract to sell their aircraft. They wrote to the U.S. government, then to Britain, France and Germany with an offer to sell a flying machine, but were rebuffed because they insisted on a signed contract before giving a demonstration. They were unwilling even to show their photographs of the airborne Flyer. Flying Machines Proved A Reality After months of debates and questions, the US Army and a French syndicate agreed to contracts with the brothers on the condition that they demonstrated a successful public flight. Wilbur traveled to France and Orville went to Washington DC, where each proved to everyone once and for all that they had indeed invented a flying machine. They received mass praise and Wilbur’s demonstrations in France brought out viewers by the thousands. Before long the word spread like wildfire, and suddenly the brothers were the most famous people in the world, sought after by royalty, the rich, reporters and the public. The kings of England, Spain and Italy came to see Wilbur fly. Before purchasing the airplane for $30,000, the US Army requested that a passenger be able to fly along with the pilot. The brothers were up to the challenge and quickly fashioned two seats to the airplane, and in 1905, Charlie Furnas, a helper from Dayton became the first passenger. This would have been one of the Wright brothers, but their father Milton made them promise never to fly together, incase there were a flight complication, resulting in both of them dying. This way, if only one died, the other could still carry on the experiment.
One day, Army lieutenant Thomas Selfridge rode along as Orville’s passenger, serving as an official observer. A few minutes into the flight, at an altitude of about 100 feet (30 m), a propeller split and shattered, sending the aircraft out of control. Selfridge suffered a fractured skull in the crash and died that evening in the nearby Army hospital, becoming the first fatality of an airplane crash. Orville was badly injured, suffering a broken left leg and four broken ribs. Despite the wreck, Orville was determined to get back to piloting. Wilbur, meanwhile, finished out an extraordinary year in early October when he flew at New York City's Hudson-Fulton celebrations, circling the Staue of Liberty and making a 33-minute flight up and down the Hudson River alongside Manhattan in view of up to one million New Yorkers. Orville returned to flying in the months to come and took his 82-year old father on a nearly seven-minute flight, the first and only one of Milton Wright's life. The airplane rose to about 350 feet (107 m) and Milton called to his son, "Higher, Orville, higher!" Within the ranks of the elite warriors known as Ken Ju Kai (from the world of Star Walker), we extend to you, The Wright Brothers, the honorary 7th Rank Ken Ju Kai. We are inspired by your subscription and master of the ‘art of winning’. May god continue to embrace and keep your spirits. Commenteors – What other people have to say about this Star Walker of the Month, these commentaries are like comets and meteors, brief but prolific and enlightening – sure to leave a trail of insightfulness across your heart - what we call Commenteors. To Star Walk – Click here and find the stars of The Wright Brothers as they are forever remembered in the galaxy of the stars within the Star Walker Universe. View and watch the skies slowly fill in the coming months and years as the light of Star Walker, after Star Walker, after Star Walker fills the heavens. We do this as an interactive tribute to those who have through fate, destiny, and even under divine purpose, left the rest of us behind, as well as to those who are still with us.
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