One of the Wright Brothers’ breakthroughs was the realization that an inherently stable airplane is difficult to control in that it wants to keep following its original path. Therefore they designed their planes to be inherently UNstable. The resulting aircraft were easier to turn but when banked for a turn lift was lost, the aircraft stalled, and at the altitudes they flew at there was no room to recover. This, along with spins and the aircraft breaking up in midair, became a leading cause of death for early flyers.
Freeflight model airplanes are designed for inherent stability and any builder from Langley to the present can take one look at a Wright Flyer and say, “That could use more (some) dihedral.” Why didn’t the Wrights make this correction to their design, which used knowledge available to them, rather than burying so many pilots? Providing SOME inherent stability would not prove their theories wrong.
And what’s with the excessive travel in the elevator and rudders? That’s a recipe for disaster. And why no vertical stabilizer?
I think you answered your own question. The Wrights found that inherently stable designs were difficult to turn, so they made an airplane that was less stable. Man had been flying for over a century before Orville took the first powered, controlled flight; but balloons were at the mercy of the winds and gliders were simple. There was not a lot known about aerodynamics.
The Wrights trusted calculations by the leading aerodynamicist at the time (I want to say Octave Chanute, but I’d have to look it up to be certain), and found that the calculations were incorrect. They designed and built a small wind tunnel to gather emperical data.
While they certainly increased the amount of aerodynamic data, they still had yet to build a working powered aircraft. They didn’t know, for example, that they needed vertical stabilizers until they experienced yaw and found that they could counter it by adding the stabs. They would not necessarily have known how much movement they would need in their control surfaces. In fact, early controls were not like the ones we think of today. The wing warping (which performed the same function as ailerons) was controlled by the pilot shifting his weight in a “saddle”. Left and right rudder (and possibly, later, wing warping) used a fore-and-aft movement of one stick (not left-and-right) while the elevator was controlled by a second stick. The Wrights performed many calculations, experiments, and flight tests; but it was still a new science. The first powered aircraft was bound to have problems, and with our modern perspective the solutions seem obvious. But to them, it was very new.
FWIW, modern helicopters are inherently unstable. Constant, minute control inputs must be made to the cyclic to keep them flying.
But my point was that the solutions were the conventional wisdom back then. O&W seemed to have thrown the baby out with the bathwater by rejecting ALL conventional wisdom rather than saving the good (some stability is a GOOD thing) while throwing out the bad (but too much can be bad). And testing their control surfaces in their wind tunnel would tell them how much travel is too much. Or I could be falsely accusing them based on the repro they were building on Nova last night. (“Gee, are you sure you want 75° travel in that rudder? A lot of guys would put in stops so it couldn’t go that far.”)
It just seems to me that a lot of guys died unnecessarily. Had O&W made the aircraft a bit more stable some of those guys might’ve lived another two or three weeks flying the deathtraps with wings folks flew back then.**
My dad took the stick in one once. After nice, stable B-17s and Cessnas he found the experience harrowing.
FYI modern fighter jets are also usually designed to be unstable. The infamous “wobbily goblin” (F117) is reportedly so unstable that without the computers the pilot wouldn’t have a chance.
I’ve seen a couple of tv shows about people working on reproductions of the 1903 wright flyer. The hardest thing for them is often resisting the temptation to make a slight tweak here or there for something that is really obvious to someone with a modern understanding of aerodynamics. Many have commented on just how dangerous an authentic 1903 wright flyer is and how that out of the blue the thing tends to want to plant itself face down into the grass.
My impression of the Wright Flyer reproductions is that they are extremely hard to fly. The poor results may be due to lack of preparation and experience with the control system. The Wrights flew hundreds of test flights with their gliders, giving them plenty of experience with the wing-warping system. Then when it was time for powered flight, they made it look easy. Not to take anything away from the Wrights (they were excellent engineers; Edison was a tinkerer in comparison), but a big reason they were first may have been that they were lucky and skilled enough to learn how to fly without getting killed.