Wilbur Wright no relation canard
The Wright Flyer (also known as the Kitty Hawk, Flyer I or the 1903 Flyer) made the first sustained flight by a manned heavier-than-air powered and controlled aircraft—an airplane—on December 17, 1903. Invented and flown by brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright, it marked the beginning of the pioneer era of aviation.
The aircraft is a single-place biplane design with anhedral (drooping) wings, front elevator (a canard) and rear rudder. It used a 12 horsepower gasoline engine powering two pusher propellers. Employing 'wing warping' it was relatively unstable and very difficult to fly.
The Wright brothers flew it four times in a location now part of the town of Kill Devil Hills, about 4 miles (6 kilometers) south of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The airplane flew 852 ft (260 m) on its fourth and final flight, but was damaged on landing, and minutes later powerful gusts blew it over, wrecking it.
The aircraft never flew again but was shipped home and subsequently restored by Orville. The aircraft was initially displayed in a place of honor at the London Science Museum until 1948 when the resolution of an acrimonious priority dispute finally allowed it to be displayed in the Smithsonian. It is now exhibited in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.Influence
The Flyer series of aircraft were the first to achieve controlled heavier-than-air flight, but some of the mechanical techniques the Wrights used to accomplish this were not influential for the development of aviation as a whole, although their theoretical achievements were. The Flyer design depended on wing-warping controlled by a hip cradle under the pilot, and a foreplane or "canard" for pitch control, features which would not scale and produced a hard-to-control aircraft. The Wrights' pioneering use of "roll control" by twisting the wings to change wingtip angle in relation to the airstream led to the more practical use of ailerons by their imitators, such as Glenn Curtiss and Henri Farman. The Wrights' original concept of simultaneous coordinated roll and yaw control (rear rudder deflection), which they discovered in 1902, perfected in 1903–1905, and patented in 1906, represents the solution to controlled flight and is used today on virtually every fixed-wing aircraft. The Wright patent included the use of hinged rather than warped surfaces for the forward elevator and rear rudder. Other features that made the Flyer a success were highly efficient wings and propellers, which resulted from the Wrights' exacting wind tunnel tests and made the most of the marginal power delivered by their early homebuilt engines; slow flying speeds (and hence survivable accidents); and an incremental test/development approach. The future of aircraft design lay with rigid wings, ailerons and rear control surfaces. A British patent of 1868 for aileron technology had apparently been completely forgotten by the time the 20th century dawned.
After a single statement to the press in January 1904 and a failed public demonstration in May, the Wright Brothers did not publicize their efforts, and other aviators who were working on the problem of flight (notably Alberto Santos-Dumont) were thought by the press to have preceded them by many years. After their successful demonstration flight in France on August 8, 1908, they were accepted as pioneers and received extensive media coverage.
no relation