From: Ray ®	09/11/2001 17:22:19
Subject: re: AVIATION FAQ	post id: 490488
Were the Wright Brother the first to fly or not? From: Greg Mc ® The Wrights and Pearce are duking it out over powered flight but of course many people had flown highly successful gliders years earlier. The Wrights of course had flown their own gliders before setting about attaching an engine. An English gentleman Cayley had build a glider which he instructed/forced his coachman to fly into a valley. They conducted a number of successful flights with the most remarkable result being the angry resignation from service of the coachman. Otto Lillienthal built and flew numerous gliders from an artificial hill in Berlin. There are many photographs of his flights and various designs. He eventually died in a crash but had made hundreds of flights previously. If Lillienthal or perhaps even Cayley had flown their craft from hills with a decent up draught in the fashion of a modern hang-glider, they may have stayed aloft for hours at a time. The Wright flyer is a "canard" or tail first design and the handling properties are quite different to those accustomed to tail draggers. Their centre of gravity in relation to the main wing needs to be considerably further forward than a conventional design. A fair proportion of the lift duties needs to be placed on the foreplane and at lowish speeds, the foreplane will tend to stall before the main wing, allowing the machine to drop nose down in a steepish glide rather than stalling a wing and suffering a potential stall spin. The video of the recent recreation seems to suggest a conventional weight distribution rather than a more stable canard weight distribution and the recreation looks particularly prone to backflips and oversensitivity. The footage of the original shows the pilots pulling quite a deal of "up" forplane before the nose will rise. This seems more indicative of a forward, more stable centre of gravity. Their later flyers incorporated a tailplane as well as the foreplane/canard. Richard Pearse