The Wright brothers' biggest challenge? Steering the dang plane

"Wilbur gliding to the right, bottom view of glider."

Image: Wright Brothers/Library of Congress

Before their groundbreaking powered flight over the dunes of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on Dec. 17, 1903, the Wright Brothers conducted hundreds of test flights with unpowered gliders and kites

Though Orville and Wilbur are widely considered the fathers of powered flight, their true breakthrough was in developing a system of controls to safely balance and steer a flying machine, a paramount task following the deaths of fellow aviation pioneers Otto Lilienthal and Percy Pilcher in glider tests.

Between 1900 and 1902, the brothers designed and flew a series of gliders to test methods of controlling three axes of aircraft movement: yaw, pitch and roll. The first two were handled with a vertical rudder and horizontal elevator, but the true innovation came in their solution for the third axis of control: roll.  Read more...