At 10:35 a.m. on December 17, 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright of Ohio launched what looked to many like a giant box kite off a windswept sand dune in Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina. Orville was at the controls. The short flight ushered a new era of aviation: powered, sustained flight of a heavier-than-air machine with a pilot at the controls.
The first flight was brief—it lasted 12 seconds and covered 120 feet. For perspective, that is about 40 feet short of the width of a high school football field. On the fourth flight that day, the Wright Flyer would be in the air for approximately 59 seconds and cover a distance of 852 feet, but duration and distance were not critical metrics that day. After years of experimentation, trial, and error, piloted sustained powered flight had been achieved.
