First Flight

Well Lady CurbCursher got to see the lighthouses, I really wanted to see Kitty Hawk and see where the Wright Brothers first accomplished powered flight. We stopped in at the Wright Brothers National Memorial while traveling between Currituck and Bodie Island lighthouses. In some ways there is not a lot to see here, it is mostly a place that you can just be, and imagine history being made.

There is Kill Devil Hill, with the memorial placed atop it. The place where the brothers spent a couple of years perfecting gliders and figuring out how to control flight. At the base of the hill is a large stone that marks where each of the four flights in December 1903 started. And starting 120 feet from that stone are markers showing just how far each of those flights lasted (the longest was 852 feet). There is a visitors center with a small museum, and a centennial pavilion that host more exhibits. In the exhibits you get a feel for just how incredible the Wright Brothers feat was. They were bicycle mechanics, they had no training in engineering or aerodynamics. There were large scientific institutions like the Smithsonian that were spending large amounts of money with “experts” to make the first manned flight happen. These two guys basically had a will to fly, and the ingenuity and desire to make it work. And they did. All in all its a great American story about how two brothers made their dream come true because they would not accept that they could not do it.

Pictures of our visit to the Wright Memorial are here.

This entry was posted on August 15, 2008 at 4:16 pm and is filed under RV Stuff, Travel Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.