On Constant Winds
Old Dominion Professors Chronicle
First Flight Re-Enactment

By Elizabeth O. Cooper

On a cold, dreary December day almost 100 years ago, two brothers from Dayton, Ohio, climbed atop a windswept sand dune at Kitty Hawk, N.C., and propelled the world into a new era with the first heavier-than-air powered flight.

As the country prepares to celebrate the centennial of that momentous 12-second flight, an inventor and former airline pilot and founder of an antique aircraft restoration company is preparing to make history of his own with an authentic replica of Wilbur and Orville Wright’s 1903 Flyer. Ken Hyde, president of the Wright Experience in Warrenton, Va., has spent more than a decade immersed in the Wright Brothers drawings and plans for their various flyers to try to understand the secrets behind the duo’s success. Hyde and his team of engineers are currently putting the final touches on the reproduction, which they plan to exhibit at a variety of centennial-of-flight celebrations. The anniversary events will climax with a re-enactment of the first flight on Dec. 17, at the Wright Brothers National Memorial in Kill Devil Hills, N.C. Although other groups are building reproductions of the Flyer, the Wright Experience is the only one officially sanctioned by the brothers’ descendants and the National Park Service.

While Hyde peruses the Wrights’ drawings and papers to determine how they constructed the flyer, two Old Dominion faculty members are delving into his venture, as well as that of the bicycle shop owners-turned-aviation pioneers. English instructors Eugene McAvoy and Temple West are finishing work on a book profiling Hyde and the Wright Experience and comparing Hyde’s reverse engineering work with the Wright Brothers’ engineering of the Wright Flyer.

After Hyde brought the flyer to Old Dominion’s Langley Full Scale Wind Tunnel to test its propeller, Robert Ash, interim vice president for research, realized Old Dominion could become more involved in the project beyond sharing the university’s engineering expertise. He asked Michael Pearson, director of Old Dominion’s Creative Writing Program to attend a meeting to discuss the project’s potential. Remembering that McAvoy had written a book involving airplanes, Pearson asked if he and West would be interested in joining the project. The colleagues, who both received their M.F.A. degrees in creative writing from Old Dominion in 1999, obtained grants from the Kettering Family Foundation and the Old Dominion University Research Foundation to research the book and began work in 2000.

System Engineering Meets Reverse Engineering
Traveling to Hyde’s workshop in Warrenton, the Wright Brothers National Memorial and the Smithsonian, where the original Wright Flyer is housed, and reading biographies about the brothers, McAvoy and West realized that the story is about more than Ken Hyde and his reproduction of the Wright Flyer. Indeed, reverse engineering and systems engineering both play prominent roles in this centennial story of man-powered flight.

“After our basic research of the Wright Brothers, our understanding of the project kind of grew. At first we thought it was only about Ken Hyde’s reverse engineering of the plane. Yet we quickly realized that there are greater principles at work,” McAvoy notes. “The Wright Brothers arguably were the first systems engineers. Systems engineering is becoming an increasingly influential approach to engineering, and it’s important, I believe, to explore its roots. There’s a growing awareness of how engineers learn and think differently, how they possess and use knowledge differently from others. This is beautifully exemplified in the work of both the Wright Brothers and Ken Hyde.”

West and McAvoy also found that their styles and interests in the project complement each other well. West, a creative nonfiction writer who relates to people, focused on the Wright Brothers, Hyde and those working with him, and the intersection of people and craft. McAvoy, a fiction writer, who was more interested in the science and technology of the project, looked at the engineering aspect. Their collaboration has resulted in an exploration of the engineering behind the flyer as revealed by Hyde’s reverse engineering. They have submitted proposals to several publishers and hope to have the book printed in time for the centennial celebration in December.

The book’s working title is On Constant Winds, a suggestion of the continuity of flight from the Wright Brothers throughout the 20th century. “The idea of constancy and winds generating lift metaphorically and literally encompassed the title we wanted,” McAvoy says.

Detective Work
However, the book primarily is a profile of Hyde’s efforts to follow exactly in the Wrights’ footsteps in building the 2003 edition of the Wright Flyer. Hyde has acknowledged that in many respects it is much more difficult to re-engineer the plane and figure out exactly how the Wrights constructed it than it was to invent it 100 years ago. McAvoy and West note that no one before Hyde looked at the 1903 Flyer so closely to determine what made the propeller and the fabric covering the wings so efficient, the key to a systems engineering approach.

“He really has analyzed every single component of that machine,” West adds. “Ken Hyde asked the right questions and looked at articles, patents and existing artifacts.”

The answers to those questions have not always been easy to find. Fearing copycats, the Wright Brothers left few records of their work, forcing Hyde and his team to build their reproduction from photographs and letters written by the brothers. Even the rebuilt flyer that hangs in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum is considered to be flawed, since the propeller was rebuilt from Orville Wright’s memories years after being destroyed by a gust of wind.

“The Wright Brothers left a lot of correspondence but few explanations,” McAvoy says. “They were remarkably protective of patents and were worried that their patents would be infringed upon. More importantly, some things worked for them that they didn’t understand. Orville wrote a lot of papers about propeller testing, but he never knew why it worked.”

A Little Help From His Friends
As he blazes new territory in reproducing the Wright Flyer, Hyde has called on not only engineers and those with a background in flight to assist him, but also others whose interests would initially have been thought of as peripheral, but who have contributed much to understanding the workings behind that first flight.

“There’s a man in Warrenton named Larry Parks whose hobby is woodworking with old tools,” West notes. “He looked at the propeller and saw that the Wright Brothers used certain tools to carve the propeller. Ken Hyde’s workshop is filled with people like Larry who bring their love of craft to the project.”

Parks and others with an interest in the past have proven invaluable to Hyde and the team. With his goal of 100 percent authenticity, Hyde is building the replica using the same tools and materials that the Wrights would have employed. In fact, a large portion of the craft has been constructed with West Virginia silver spruce, the same wood used on the 1903 Flyer. Hyde also duplicated the “Pride of the West” muslin originally designed for ladies’ undergarments, which the Wrights used to cover the wings.

Although one would suspect that McAvoy and West could gather much of their material simply by interviewing Hyde, that has not been the case. “Ken is more interested in his project than in talking about himself,” West notes. “We’re trying to figure out where his passion comes from because that is where genius and invention originate. That is what allowed him to get this project working, and it is anything but a simple project. The first time we went to Warrenton, we had the image of a man tinkering in his little garage. But the workshop is huge. He has a humongous hangar. It’s a huge business. It wasn’t a little backyard venture.”

Although Hyde has always been interested in flying, West adds that the former American Airlines pilot swears he has not had a lifelong fascination with the Wright Brothers. But that was one of the few insights Hyde willingly gave the authors. They mainly had to glean snippets about him by watching him at work and listening to him talk.

“We tried to make direct parallels to one of the Wright Brothers,” West says. “That was a dead-end tangent. You observe and listen to him and think about it and ask questions and observe some more and put your own spin on it. It allows you to get to the deeper and broader truth than the facts alone do.”

To do that, they called upon their backgrounds in creative nonfiction. “That’s the beauty of creative nonfiction,” McAvoy adds. “It allows you to surmise. The form allows you to fill in the blanks without sacrificing the factuality of the story.”

McAvoy and West describe the book, which they expect to complete by the end of the summer, as a hybrid of profile and history. “There’s not enough personal interest for it to be only a profile and not enough popular interest in a profile for it to be an academic treatise,” West says. “The most challenging part was figuring out its actual structure.”

The book looks at each of the plane’s major systems and introduces the engineering aspect through Hyde’s testing of each system. That in turn allows entry to the Wright Brothers’ work a century ago. “Much as the Wright Brothers, we’re systems engineers,” McAvoy contends. “We’re looking at the plane’s systems and taking a systemic approach to the plane itself and using it as a structural artifice.”

“It illuminates the original engineering,” West adds.

Working on the project gave the writers new insight into the Wright Brothers. “We discovered that they are much more interesting than the popular media has represented them,” West says. “A lot of things you hear about them have been watered down.”

McAvoy adds that he was surprised that the Wrights were scientists in addition to engineers. He believes that the brothers intersected art and engineering in the construction of the flyer. While some scholars believe that if the Wrights had not been successful, another inventor would have soon taken to flight, McAvoy firmly rejects that opinion.

“A commonly held belief is that if it were not them it would have been someone else within months. For what it’s worth, one of the things I’ve come to believe is that it would not have been someone else within a matter of months. It would have been a long time, and it would have been someone just like them. It had to have been systems engineers.”

West and McAvoy hope the book will leave readers with a better understanding of the intersection of art and engineering and a greater respect for people like the Wright Brothers and Ken Hyde who are willing to take risks and spend years in the pursuit of their goals.