17 December 2006

Taking Wing

I staggered in from the road last night burdened with the packages that rode in the bed of my Son's truck. It had been another of those hurtling rocket-journeys from the upper mid-west to the Potomac, each one having its deadly sameness and small unexpected surprises.

Velocity is what it is about, and if you can average nearly eighty miles an hour while in flight, keep the farms moving smoothly abeam, and mount the hills forthrightly, you can make the trip all in daylight, even in the short days before the solstice.

I don't know if the man at the McDonald's restaurant in Detroit meant to mug me or not. It is possible that he was simply one of the legion of the deranged who populate the streets of my old home-town. But my spider sense screamed that something was wrong, and I avoided the close encounter at the last moment.

I swear we have worn grooves in the Ohio and Pennsylvania Turnpikes from the round trips to visit the folks, who are retired upstate in Michigan, and from the two campus towns where the boys each spent their college days.

There are moments on the drive when you swear you could take wing. The high plateau of central Pennsylvania is spectacular, after the flat brown earth of Ohio, and there is nothing like the vista that lies before you that spreads below from the crest of Town Hill headed south into Maryland.

The ridges are lower from Hagarstown and into historic Fredrick as the farms disappear into bedroom communities. The drivers around also change character, from phlegmatic long-distance travelers and local agriculturists into tightly-wound psychopaths, cutting and weaving for the smallest advantage on the concrete race-way.

It is an adjustment, in the night, to the mind-set of the city.

I don't know how the Wright Brothers got away with it. They were camped out on the dunes of the Outer Banks in North Carolina this very day, just over a century ago, gauging the on-shore winds for the most favorable conditions to attempt the fist heavier-than-air manned flight.

I don't know how they got their Christmas cards out on time, or finished shopping. There were no malls on the Outer Banks, nothing except the little Rescue Station on the beach.

People were probably used to not hearing from the eccentric brothers from Dayton. They had been coming to the Kill Devil Hills annually since 1899, fine-tuning their system of manned flight. The wind was part of it, and so was the expanse of soft sand in which they expected to crash their aircraft.

Wind is an everyday occurrence on the Outer Banks, but the winter is the time when the temperature is low, and the air is dense. Cool wind provides the greatest possible lift. December is the best month to attempt to invent the flying machine, not like the warm and humid days of summer that draw the tourists to flock to Duck, the booming resort town up the island,

It can be bitterly cold in the winter, enough to make the crew at the Rescue Station lean their chairs back around the pot-belly stove, and think of the summer. Being right on the ocean, the weather reflects the mood of the water, and the gentle southwest breezes assumed a certain imperative, gusting to over twenty miles an hour.

The Brothers invited everyone for six miles around to come and watch the First Flight, but in the end only eight men were there to witness the flight, most of whom were the familiar faces from the  Life-Saving Station at Kill Devil Hills Beach.

The Rescue Service was one of the progenitors of today's Coast Guard, and their mission was to help with shipwrecks and maritime disasters. The employees were called Surfmen because they retrieved shipwreck victims in lifeboats launched and beached through the surf. Their services were usually required only when conditions were the worst, in high winds and pounding surf.

The corporate behemoths of Airbus and Boeing accuse each other bitterly of having unseen government support to advance their commercial business, so it is worthwhile to remember that government was involved in aviation since before the beginning.

Having no one to rescue most of the time, the Surfmen helped set up their experimental station about a mile from the Life-Saving Service building in September of the year. The rescue station served as the logistics hub for the camp, bringing the mail and supplies. They even brought the lumber for the work-shed and the rails from which the first airplane would launch.

The Wrights arranged a signal light to notify the station that an experiment was scheduled, since the aircraft was too heavy for the brothers to man-handle alone.

Surfmen John T. Daniels, W. S. Dough, and Adam Etheridge trudged up from the beach to assist in the bitter cold.

Wilbur and Orville flipped a coin to see who would fly first. Daniels used Orville's glass-plate camera to take the immortal photograph of the first plane in flight. Orville was at the controls and Wilbur leaned in alongside, appearing to will the motorized kite into the breeze.

It was a remarkably short flight, if you pace it off at the Memorial today. The next three flights were much more impressive, based on distance, but the point was made on the first,

After the fourth flight, the insistent wind caught a wing and rolled the flying machine over. Daniels and the Wrights struggled to stabilize the aircraft, and Daniels was injured in the attempt.

As it happened, the machine was too badly damaged to conduct further trials, and the activity ended for the season.

The Wright's left the wings in the custody of Adam Etheridge, and took the engine back to Dayton for the holidays.

That is a tradition I support, in my small way, and always attempt to bring the motor home with me on my travels.

The wreckage was put back together to form the he ungainly but elegant machine that hangs in the lobby of the Air and Space Museum downtown.

The motor obviously has been changed, since the brothers fooled around with it to coax a few more horsepower from the cast-iron block.

With increased power and more confidence, they were able to abandon the shores and attempt flights in Ohio, where they crashed less frequently than you would expect.

I assume their performance on the Christmas Card list improved, even if there were many more of them to write. They were much closer to home, after all, and the Rescue Station didn't have to handle the mail.

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Close Window