Not within a thousand years

Monday will mark the 115th anniversary of the Wright Brothers' flight at Kitty Hawk. With the passage of time, major breakthroughs like this sometimes seem inevitable. The hard work, sacrifices, and doubts along the way are long gone, wallpapered over by the glow of success.

While it is an amazing achievement that the Wrights started their aeronautical research in 1896 and managed to make history at Kitty Hawk only seven years later (and this while running a successful bicycle shop at the same time), the outcome wasn't always certain. After all, many bright, hardworking people had spent decades of their lives trying to solve the mystery of flight. Some of them went bankrupt—and those were the lucky ones, since they only lost their fortunes. Others like Otto Lilienthal and Percy Pilcher lost their lives.

Lilienthal's last words are said to have been "Opfer müssen gemacht werden": Sacrifices must be made. His (and Pilcher's) sacrifice was not in vain, at the Wrights cited both of them as influences on their work.

The Wrights built on the work of those who had given up so much before them, and in 1900 started their first experiments at Kitty Hawk. Their first year there they learned a large amount about aerodynamics, and found that much of what had been hypothesized at the time was wrong. Nonetheless, they had very promising results in regard to the largest aeronautical problem of the time: aircraft control. They finished that year very encouraged and eager to take their new results back to Dayton to work with before next year's voyage back to North Carolina's sand dunes.

It seemed as if all was going extremely well. They thought they were on their way to solving the unsolvable problem of flight. Unfortunately, in 1901, they were unable to duplicate their former success. Nothing came easily. Nothing worked. They gave up a month early and trudged back to Dayton dejectedly. The going had gotten tough, and they thought it might be too tough for them. In 1912, Wilbur said of those days:

[W]e doubted that we would ever resume our experiments. Although we had broken the record for distance in gliding, and although Mr. Chanute, who was present at that time, assured us that our results were better than had ever before been attained, yet when we looked at the time and money which we had expended, and considered the progress made and the distance yet to go, we considered our experiments a failure. At that time I made the prediction that men would sometime fly, but that it would not be within our lifetime.

According to Orville, Wilbur was even more hopeless than that, and said simply, "Not within a thousand years would man ever fly."

As we all know, only two years later they would go down in history. So when you're feeling like you'll never manage to fly, remember that the Wright Brothers themselves thought the same thing too.

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The author is an airline pilot, flight instructor, and adjunct college professor teaching aviation ground schools. He holds an ATP certificate with ERJ-145 and DHC-8 type ratings, as well as CFI, CFII, MEI, AGI, and IGI certificates, and is a Master-level participant in the FAA's WINGS program and a former FAASafety Team representative. He is on Facebook as Larry the Flying Guy, has a Larry the Flying Guy YouTube channel, and is on Twitter as @Lairspeed.

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