Huffman Prairie and the First Practical Airplane
Near Dayton, Ohio
Kitty Hawk got the headlines. Huffman Prairie got the airplane.
In December of nineteen three, the Wright brothers made four powered flights on a beach in North Carolina. The longest lasted fifty-nine seconds and covered about eight hundred fifty feet. The machine worked. But it was not yet an airplane in the full sense, meaning a vehicle that could be reliably controlled, turned, and brought safely back to earth.
The brothers returned to Dayton and secured use of a pasture eight miles northeast of town belonging to a banker named Torrence Huffman. He let them use it free of charge, on one condition: that they not scare his cows. At Huffman Prairie, in nineteen four and nineteen five, they did the harder work. They made roughly one hundred fifty flights, inventing and refining the catapult launch system when wind was too light, learning to bank into a turn, learning to stay aloft for minutes at a time.
On September twentieth, nineteen four, Wilbur flew the first complete circle ever made by a powered heavier-than-air machine. On October fifth, nineteen five, he flew twenty-four and a half miles in thirty-eight minutes and three seconds, circling the meadow until the fuel ran out. A handful of invited witnesses watched from the fence. The press was not informed. The brothers had patents pending and were not eager for competitors to learn what they had.
The nineteen oh five Wright Flyer Three, which the brothers themselves considered the world's first practical airplane, survives today at Carillon Historical Park in Dayton. The original field at Huffman Prairie is now part of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and is preserved as a National Historic Landmark. The cows are gone. The grass is still there.
