The NASA SCIence Files™
Aviation Pioneers
Purpose: To learn about the historic first flight by the Wright Brothers

Materials

Procedure
  1. Read background information about the Wright Brothers.
  2. Design a poster as an advertisement asking people to volunteer to fly with the Wright Brothers.
  3. Write a newspaper account of the first flight and include how the local people may have felt about the Wright Brothers and their flying machine.
  4. Share your poster and story with the class.
Background
As the sun rose on December 17, 1903, a bitter wind blew about 22 to 27 miles per hour by the fishermen's shanties of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Kill Devil Hills, four miles south of Kitty Hawk, was barren and dreary.

By noon that day, in that remote corner of America, two obscure bicycle makers, Orville and Wilbur Wright from Dayton, Ohio, had flown four times in a powered airplane. They had fitted a biplane with a 16-horse power motor, giving the aircraft a total weight of 750 pounds. In the first flight, Orville Wright flew 30-35 miles per hour, covering 120 feet in 12 seconds. Later that same day, Wilbur Wright flew the machine 852 feet in 59 seconds.

After the last flight was completed, a gust of wind tumbled the machine and damaged it enough to call a halt to the experiments. The Wright brothers packed up and went back to Dayton. They had done something that man had been striving towards since recorded history began. Orville and Wilbur Wright later wrote that the first 12-second flight was "the first in the history of the world in which a machine carrying a man had raised itself by its own power into the air in free flight, had sailed forward on a level course without reduction of speed, and had finally landed without being wrecked."

Extension

  1. Conduct an internet search for additional facts about the Wright brothers and that historic first flight.
  2. Design a postcard to honor the historic flight and send it to a friend, writing them about the first flight as if you actually had witnessed the event.