September 5, 2008
A Century of Flight
Soaring to retrace Wright brothers
Centennial: An Eastern Shore woman is competing to pilot a reproduction of the plane used in 1903 for the first powered, heavier-than-air flight.
At her home in Trappe, Md., on the Eastern Shore, Terry Queijo, a pilot with American Airlines, holds a model of the 1903 Wright Flyer. Three others are vying for the honor to pilot the re-created plane. (Sun photo by Barbara Haddock Taylor / December 15, 2002)
First in an occasional series
WARRENTON, Va. -- On a grass runway last fall,
amid the low rolling hills of the countryside, Terry Queijo prepared for
takeoff.
Her 32-foot aircraft, a reproduction of a 1902 Wright brothers glider,
resembled an overgrown box kite made of wood and bed sheets. It hardly looked
flight-worthy.
Resting belly to earth in the glider's cradle, the Eastern Shore resident
concentrated intently as a pickup truck ahead cruised down the runway at 25
mph - glider in tow.
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Within moments, Queijo ascended, hovering 20 feet above the earth. She
craned her neck to see the grass below and then, tweaking a front lever,
gently "skipped" in the air - rising and falling and rising again - inhaling
the aromatic scent of apples that permeated the breeze from a nearby orchard.
For Queijo, an American Airlines captain, the spectacle was a training
session.
She is the lone woman among four pilots competing to portray Orville or
Wilbur and fly the first exact reproduction of the 1903 Wright Flyer near
Kitty Hawk, N.C., on Dec. 17 next year - the 100th anniversary of the world's
first powered, heavier-than-air flight.
The flight will culminate a yearlong series of events beginning Tuesday to
celebrate the birth of aviation and the two tinkering inventors from Dayton,
Ohio, who made it possible.
On that September afternoon, shifting the wings in opposite directions
through a wiggle of her hips, she executed rolls and turns and honed her
understanding of the glider's "wing warping" mechanism - the signature element
of the Wright brothers' invention of three-axis aerodynamic control. By
sunset, Queijo had soared a half-dozen times in the autumn air.
When it was all over, she drifted the wheelless, 112- pound craft down,
climbed out and reported to engineers: "Very smooth - like flying a Kleenex."
That was good news for engineers and craftsmen at the Wright Experience, a
vintage plane-restoration company on 25 acres here that has been hired to
reproduce the 1903 Flyer - in the smallest detail possible - for the
centennial moment.
It's no easy task. The Wright brothers worked in secret to keep imitators
from stealing their ideas. And many of their early prototypes were destroyed,
along with construction documentation and drawings.
Wright re-creations
Founded in 1998, the company has been re-creating the Wright brothers'
12-year period of evolutionary design to understand the science behind the
bicycle mechanics' breakthroughs.
Its first project - a duplicate of the 1899 kite that confirmed the
brothers' wing-warping theory - was completed in 1999. A year later, the
company constructed the 1900 glider and last year, the 1901 glider, both kite
descendants. Next month, after a decade of research, hundreds of thousands of
dollars, and more than 2 1/2 years of construction, it expects to finish an
authentic 1903 Flyer. A copy of the first mass-produced military airplane, the
1911 Wright Model B, could be finished by March.
Reproductions of five other Wright Flyers built between 1904 and 1910 and a
1911 glider are in the research phase.
"There really hasn't been anything that has contributed so much to the
change of our lifestyle or the way we do business - not even in this country,
but in the world - as the airplane," says Ken Hyde, Wright Experience
president and founder, and another pilot candidate.
"Here were two men who were not members of the aeronautical community, or
the academic community for that matter, who in four years solved the problem
of flight when for hundreds of years people had been trying to solve it. The
thrill of seeing a re- enactment can be nothing but inspiring for the new
generation."
It also reaffirms the American ethos, says Randal Dietrich of the
Experimental Aircraft Association, which is organizing the centennial events
in Kitty Hawk.
"There is an affinity for these two inventors and the spirit of innovation
they encapsulated," Dietrich says. "People can identify with the Wright
brothers, as inventors, as homebuilders, as independent individuals. It's the
American story in a way: two people who had a dream and achieved it."
Copyright © 2008, The Baltimore Sun
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