Wright Brothers

My heroes are two brothers: Wilbur and Orville Wright. They are known as the pilots and designers of the first "heavier-than-air" plane.

Wilbur Wright was born on April 16, 1867 and his brother Orville was born on August 19, 1871. Before working on aviation, Wilbur and Orville were working together in the bicycle business. They founded the Wright Cycle Co. in 1892. At this time, they were not known as aviation innovators: their success started a few years later. In 1900, they decided to build their first plane. Actually, their first planes were gliders. Their designs were inspired by kites but they studied wing shapes and human-flight history during many years (They built their own wind tunnel to test the lifting effect of airfoils). They also made a lot of innovations in airplane design: they fashioned a lot of instruments to control the plane during flight. They also designed the first effective propellers (they figured out that a propeller is not like a ship's screw) and built a lightweight gas-powered engine (152lbs).

Orville Wright (Google Images)

All those innovations made them able to develop the first powered airplane in 1903 : The Flyer. The Flyer weighed only 600lbs. On December 17, 1903, Orville was the pilot for the first take-off of The Flyer. It flew only 12 seconds but it changed the world. Then (the same day) they made a 59-second and 260-meter-long flight at a height of 3 meters. Orville took photographs of his brother flying but only four newspapers in the United States carried news of this achievement. Two years later, on October 15, 1905, Wilbur flew The Flyer 3 and managed a 38-kilometer-long flight for 39 minutes.

Wilbur Wright (Google images)

I admire those brothers for their great work and determination: they studied hard during many years how to invent the first airplane and carried on working despite many crashes. They are the main aviation pioneers and without their work of genius, we would not be able to see the great airplanes built everyday by Boeing, Airbus...and I would not be able to dream of flying. Since this event, scientists carry on working on technologies that allow pilots to access places that everybody has dreamed to reach once.