Upon the first day of their trials the wind was blowing at nearly 30 miles an hour, and they allowed the glider to rise as a kite. Flown in this way, it bore the weight of a man; but they were disappointed at the position it assumed when in the air. Its planes set themselves at an angle which was too steep, and it seemed to give less lifting power than they had expected. They tested their system of control, and found that the wing-warping for sideway balance acted extremely well, proving quicker and more certain than would the shifting from side to side of the operator’s body. The elevating plane was also efficient.
Fig. 30.—Launching the Wright Glider.
Then they took the glider to the sand-hills. At first the wind was too high, but after waiting a day it dropped to 14 miles an hour, and they were able to make nearly a dozen glides down the side of a slope which had a drop of 1 foot in 6. It had been their idea, in building the machine, that the operator should run before gliding, as Lilienthal had done, and only lie upon the plane when the speed was sufficient to give the surfaces their lift. But in practice they found a better method than this. Two assistants, as illustrated in [Fig. 30], took the machine by its plane-ends and ran forward with it, the pilot assuming beforehand his position upon the plane; then, when they had gained a pace sufficient for the machine to soar, they released their hold and it glided forward. Beneath the glider, under the centre of the lower plane, there were two wooden skates or runners, and these took the weight of the machine when it alighted, and allowed it to slide forward across the ground before coming to rest. By the use of these landing skids, and by steering at as fine an angle as possible, the Wrights found they could touch ground, even at 20 miles an hour and lying across the machine, without injury either to themselves or the craft.
The first glides were short, and all close to the ground; but they bore out the tests when the machine had been flown as a kite, and showed that the elevating plane and wing-warp would do their work. The Wrights were, indeed, astonished at the celerity with which the glider responded to the fore-plane.
Writing afterwards of this first visit to Kitty Hawk, Wilbur summarised the experiments thus:
“Although the hours and hours of practice we had hoped to obtain finally dwindled down to about two minutes, we were very much pleased with the general results of the trip, for setting out as we did with almost revolutionary theories on many points and an entirely untried form of machine, we considered it quite a point to be able to return without having our pet theories completely knocked on the head by the hard logic of experience, and our own brains dashed out into the bargain.”
