After a later flight, when Orville stayed in the air fifty-five minutes, the crowd about him and Katharine, who were accompanied by Mr. and Mrs. Charles R. Flint, was so dense that Orville felt duty bound to move as fast as he could away from his party, to relieve the pressure on them. Thereafter a hollow square of German soldiers kept the crowd at a safe distance.
The German Crown Prince, Frederick Wilhelm, sought to get in touch with Orville to ask the privilege of seeing a flight. He telephoned to the Wrights’ suite at the Hotel Esplanade, and the call was answered by a young German woman whom Katharine Wright had employed as interpreter when shopping.
When the girl discovered that the voice over the phone was that of a member of the royal family, she dropped the telephone receiver and almost fainted. Members of the hotel staff were not much less agitated when they learned that royalty might be calling on two of their guests.
Orville Wright and his sister were invited by Kaiser Wilhelm himself to be present—the only civilian guests—on August 29, when Count von Zeppelin would make the first trip in his latest model airship from Friedrichshafen, and land at Tegel field, Berlin.
When he met Count von Zeppelin, Orville offered to take him for an airplane ride the next day. The Count, after expressing his appreciation, pleaded lack of time. But he invited Orville to accompany him in the airship on a trip, September 5, from Frankfort to Mannheim, and Orville accepted. In the course of that trip, Orville, by using a stop-watch in his pocket and counting telephone poles, was able to tell if the reported speed of the ship was correct. (When the Wrights were in Europe in 1907, they had seen flights by government-owned dirigibles in more than one country, and had noted that the German ship, Der Gross, was the only one that made the speed claimed for it. All they needed to learn was the length of the airship. Then by sighting on the corner of a building, while using a stop-watch, they could tell to the fraction of a second how long it took for the ship to travel its own length.)
On the airship’s arrival at Mannheim, the crowd was so great that Orville soon became separated from Captain Hildebrandt, who had come along as his interpreter. Here he was, not knowing much German, supposed to be guest of honor at a luncheon, and he didn’t even recall the name of the hotel where the affair was to be held. A member of the committee in charge of the luncheon decided that Orville would doubtless make his way to the center of the city, in search of the right hotel, and that there was just one way to locate him—to drive about the principal streets until he caught sight of him. This man had never met Orville but he felt sure he would recognize him from pictures he had seen. The plan, to Orville’s immense relief, succeeded.
On September 16, Orville raised the world’s altitude record from 100 to 172 meters. Two days later, he made a new world’s record for a flight with a passenger. Accompanied by Captain Paul Englehardt, he flew for one hour, thirty-five minutes, forty-seven seconds.
Toward the end of his stay in Germany, Orville’s flights were at Bornstedt field, near Potsdam. It was there that he trained two pilots for the German Wright company—Captain Englehardt and Herr Keidel.
Since his first meeting with Orville, the German Crown Prince had made no secret of his eager desire to fly as a passenger. As early as September 9, Orville had made a special flight of fifteen minutes for the Crown Prince to witness. Though he was willing enough to oblige the Crown Prince by taking him for a passenger flight, he hesitated to do so, lest it might be disapproved by the Kaiser, and he made one excuse after another for delay. He had been warned that if he took the Crown Prince as passenger against the Kaiser’s wishes, then he might immediately become persona non grata. The prudent thing to do, it seemed to Orville, was to give members of the royal family plenty of notification. Different members of the family came to Bornstedt field from time to time, and when he met any of them Orville was sure to remark that he and the Crown Prince were going to have a flight together before long. As no one made any objection, the German Crown Prince finally became, on October 2, the first member of a royal family ever to ride in an airplane. On landing, the Crown Prince handed to Orville, as a token of appreciation, a jeweled stick-pin—a crown set in rubies, with a “W” in diamonds. (The “W” was not for Wright, but for Wilhelm, the Crown Prince’s name.)
On that same day, Orville ascended 1,600 feet for a new—though unofficial—world’s altitude record.