Lifestyle
By: Phil McAuliffe
An American flag flaps erratically in a 10-mph breeze from its flagpole next to a white tent. Sitting at the foot of a large hill on a rolling seaside landscape, several people can be seen walking in and out looking skyward holding out their hands to gauge the light drizzle that until now had been a driving rainstorm. Inside, the shape of a fragile wood and fabric "flying machine" is visible through the open flaps of one end of the tent. It is 10:30 a.m. Dec. 17, 2003 and the place is Kitty Hawk, N.C.
In five minutes flight enthusiasts will mark the historic event that occurred exactly 100 years ago when two brothers from Dayton, Ohio Wilbur and Orville Wright piloted a similar craft across these same windswept dunes and into an age of routine air and space travel. In 1903, the entire crew consisted of five people: Wilbur, Orville and three local Kitty Hawk residents, among them John Daniels, who took the famous photograph of the "flyer" as it left the ground.
A century later would be a very different story. Thirty-five thousand people crowd around the tent and an 800-foot perimeter circle where the 2003 flyer is scheduled to fly. President George Bush has just addressed a capacity crowd braving a torrential downpour and forming a sea of umbrellas and plastic.
An elderly man in his 70s emerges from the tent and holds up a small black digital wind gauge. After a few seconds, shaking his head, he walks back into the tent. Scott Crossfield was one of the pioneers of supersonic flight, breaking the sound barrier with Chuck Yeager in the 1940s. He later would fly the X-15 with Neil Armstrong in the ’50s. Today he is lending his technological experience to a new challenge equally as daunting: to fly an exact re-creation of the Wright flyer on the exact minute the Wright brothers flew a century before.
In 2003, the multitudes would come from around the world to the Outer Banks of North Carolina to see history and remember 2003 as the "year of flight." But as in the time of the Wrights, getting to this point did not come without risk and cost.
* * *
The year of 2003 will forever be marked by the price of flight. Jan. 28 marked 17 years since the tragic explosion of space shuttle Challenger 73 seconds after launch. Early last year, in low earth orbit, seven astronauts on the shuttle Columbia held a short ceremony paying tribute to their fallen Challenger comrades. They stressed how space flight is not routine and will always come with inherent dangers. But the rewards are well worth the risk.
Four days later the names of these seven Columbia crew members would be added to that tragic list of astronauts killed in the quest to explore space.
I had been photographing the shuttle for 15 years and I even found myself taking these missions for granted. So, my first news of the disaster came via CNN. On Feb. 6, a memorial service was held on Runway 33 at the Kennedy Space Center, the very runway where Columbia would have landed six days earlier. I was among the 100 or so photographers and several thousand NASA employees trying to deal with the sense of loss for the crew, whom many got to know as friends during their training for this flight, and for the orbiter itself. Some of these people worked on Columbia for more than 20 years. To many, "she was like the eighth astronaut."
The lines between astronauts, various levels of NASA employees, and even the media, seemed to subside, at least for the moment. That day, at that service, everyone was supportive of each other. In March, the NASA press office took a small group of photographers into the hangar where much of the debris collected in Texas was brought and placed on a giant grid map of the shuttle on the floor. Each piece, some 8,000 in all, would be part of a sort of "reconstruction" for investigators.
A large spacious room built to house an intact orbiter, it was very quiet as investigators catalogued each fragment on its respective spot in the grid. Very little was recognizable and nothing was larger than a few feet across, mostly shards of sheet metal that once made up the fuselage, a landing gear here, a window frame there. Anything with corners or sharp edges seemed to be "rounded off" as they experienced melting during re-entry. With these pieces, the violence of the shuttle’s destruction was lost on none of us.
That same day, members of the Columbia accident investigation board were meeting at the Radisson Hotel in nearby Cocoa Beach. At the time, they had a working theory that a piece of foam insulation broke off the large fuel tank during launch, slamming into the left wing at more than 500 miles per hour. The board later would conclude that the wound caused by the impact allowed super hot gases during re-entry to breach the protective heat shield leading to the breakup of Columbia.
Within weeks of the disaster, it was revealed that a series of emails had been sent during the mission by a handful of engineers deep inside NASA. They almost psychically predicted the impending doom and genuinely feared for the lives of the crew. Like a single star in a universe of bureaucracy, those fears never found their mark. As it turns out, a similar situation existed in the days before Challenger’s last flight. America now was left with no manned access to space, having to depend solely on the Russian Soyuz for transportation to the International Space Station. The target date for the next shuttle mission could be some time late this year or early 2005.
In 2003, NASA’s biggest challenge was not physically modifying its fleet of three remaining orbiters for return to flight, but in communication within its own ranks. And in the case of the latter, that problem could be just as overwhelming as it was for two brothers to get off the ground in 1903.
* * *
By the time the Apollo astronauts reached the moon in 1969, many older Americans who were watching those first footsteps that summer evening may well have been alive when the Wright brothers made their first flight 66 years before. Some of those same people may have lived to see or even flown on the first regularly scheduled supersonic transatlantic flight known as the Concorde. For their entire lives these people knew nothing but progress in aviation. But for a small number of centenarians, they would live to see the first step backward in the history of flight. In April 2003, Air France and British Airways announced they were retiring their combined fleet of Concordes.
With the exception of the tragic crash of an Air France Concorde just outside Paris in July 2000, their safety record was considered flawless. Introduced in the mid 1970s, Concorde was 204-feet long and had a wingspan of 84 feet. Fully fueled, its range was 4,300 miles. On Feb. 7, 1996, a British Airways Concorde made the fastest crossing of the Atlantic Ocean in 2 hours 52 minutes and 59 seconds. Flying at an altitude of 11 miles, you could actually take off from Europe and land in New York earlier than you took off local time, of course.
But it wasn’t an accident or technology that brought this aircraft down, it was money. Concorde had a capacity of 100 passengers rich, high-paying passengers. With prices ranging from $10,000 to $14,000 for a single round-trip ticket, there just was not enough of those high-paying passengers. With the slump in air travel following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attack combined with high maintenance costs, a British Airways Concorde made its last landing at JFK airport just before 6 p.m. Oct. 23, 2003.
For many who live along the flight path, this day couldn’t have come soon enough. But you wouldn’t know it from the fanfare of departure. Members of the European and American media jockeyed for camera positions on the roof of the British Airways terminal. As the aircraft taxied away from Terminal 7, the pilot and co-pilot could be seen waving American and British flags from the co*ckpit windows. A red, white, and blue water cannon salute greeted the Concorde as it taxied toward the runway, spraying the plane and everyone on the nearby roof. At sunrise on Oct. 24, with a capacity crowd of movie stars, models and corporate executives, Concorde thundered into the sky and into history.
Less than one month later, that same British Airways Concorde would return to New York, only this time on a barge traveling up the Hudson River. It was heading for the Intrepid Air and Space museum in midtown. A permanent memorial to a flying eagle of technology, fallen to economics. One member of the British media said, "I guess from now on we’ll all have to take the bus."
* * *
Back in Kitty Hawk, as the moment draws near to the exact minute of the Wright brothers’ first flight, a very large crowd is gathering in and around the white tent being used as a makeshift hangar. Inside sits the 2003 flyer, with a 40-foot wingspan and weighing 605 pounds. It took the reproduction team led by Ken Hyde years to prepare for this moment at a cost of $1.2 million. The original plane no longer exists and there are no blueprints for it.
An announcer from the Centennial Commission stands next to a tall digital display board next to the plane with a clock counting down in large illuminated red numbers the final seconds. "Three … two … one … it’s 100 years." As cheers break out, the motionless flyer looms over the crowd.
At 10:35 a.m., 100 years earlier, the original Wright flyer was airborne with Orville piloting and Wilbur running alongside. The inauguration of the age of flight lasted 12 seconds covering a distance of 120 feet. A telegram sent by Orville to his family in Ohio summed up the achievement. "Success, Four flights Thursday morning. All against 21 mile wind … Inform Press … Home Christmas."
By noon on the Outer Banks in 2003, the weather begins to subside. Thousands of people are beginning to crowd around the 800-foot perimeter. Television networks are now broadcasting live as the pace of activity begins to pick up around the tent. Park officials clear an opening at the south end of the perimeter. Amid a cheering audience, the 2003 Wright flyer triumphantly rolls out onto the field. The crew consisting of project leader Ken Hyde, Scott Crossfield and several Wright descendents, among others, carefully positions the craft on a 200-foot wooden rail that acted as a sort of runway.
Wearing 1903-era clothing and a crash helmet, pilot Kevin Kochersberger climbs aboard as members of the crew begin pulling on two large wooden propellers to start the engine. After several attempts, the small custom-built motor sputters and then starts sounding a little bit like a weed wacker. Moments later, the craft begins to move, eventually lifting about 6 inches before twisting awkwardly to the right and splashing into a mud puddle. Mr. Kochersberger drops his head in disappointment. Dec. 17, 2003 would not be the Wright brothers’ day.
From 1903, Wilber and Orville would go on to refine their aircraft and tour the United States and Europe all the while fighting court battles over patent rights. Wilbur would not live to see where their invention would lead. He died of typhoid fever in May 1912. Orville spent the rest of his life ensuring the Wright brothers’ place in history. He would live to see aviator Charles Lindbergh cross the Atlantic, and witness the dawn of supersonic flight by people such as Chuck Yeager and Scott Crossfield. Orville died at 76 in January 1948 of a heart attack while fixing a doorknob in his Dayton, Ohio home.
As 2003 drew to close, the spirit of the Wright brothers was still very much alive. In August, the planet Mars made its closest approach to the earth since space travel began. An armada of three unmanned spacecraft was dispatched, one from Europe and two from the United States. Their destination? The surface of the red planet in search of life. In October, China joined the space age with the launch of a single human in low Earth orbit. His mission? National pride.
In the wake of the Columbia disaster an American shuttle crew is training for their return to space on Atlantis. They will be led by Eileen Collins, who not long ago was the first female shuttle commander.
All of this is part of a huge learning curve, both technically and economically. With every step, there have been many missteps. Even the triumphant Apollo moon landing program started with the deaths of three astronauts on the launch pad. Every success, since day one, was made on the shoulders of those who tried first and failed.
So one can only imagine what lies ahead. And wonder if the Wright brothers were here today what would they be thinking?
