They Just Didn’t Have the Wright Stuff

Other designs all chose to pin the tail on the airplane.

Peter Garrison

Monday, November 11, 2024 at 08:40 AM ET

Verified

Edited By:

Travis Tingle

Longitudinally unstable to a point that would be unimaginable today, and with sketchy roll-and-yaw control, the Wright Flyer machines were not really 'simplicity itself' to fly. [Adobe Stock]

Key Takeaways:

Louis Blériot's successful 1909 English Channel crossing in his Model 11 established the "tail-aft" aircraft configuration as the dominant design, quickly overshadowing the pioneering but more unstable Wright Flyer.
The Wright Brothers chose a canard configuration (elevators in front) for their aircraft, believing in pilot control over inherent stability and placing pitch control upfront, despite historical precedents for the more stable tail-aft design.
Early canard designs, like the Wright Flyer, were prone to unrecoverable stalls due to poorly understood principles of longitudinal stability, which contributed to their rapid obsolescence in favor of Blériot's conventional configuration.

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On October 28, 1908, the New York Times reported, under the headline “WRIGHT TEACHES FLYING,” that Wilbur Wright was teaching a certain Count de Lambert to fly. European nobility habitually shored up its ruins with heaps of names. The full handle of Wright’s pupil, who was his first, was Charles Alexandre Maurice Joseph Marie Jules Stanislas Jacques de Lambert.

After three flights totaling 35 minutes, the count told the Times reporter that the “handling of the aeroplane was simplicity itself, and he was confident that he would become proficient in a very short time.”