Wright Flyer III: The Plane the Wrights Called Their Best
Near Dayton, Ohio
Carillon Historical Park sits along the Great Miami River in south Dayton, and inside its Wright Brothers Aviation Center rests an aircraft unlike any other in the world. The nineteen oh five Wright Flyer III is the only airplane ever designated a National Historic Landmark.
Most people know about the Flyer that made history at Kitty Hawk on December seventeenth, nineteen oh three. What fewer realize is that the brothers considered that machine, impressive as it was, a prototype. It flew four times that morning, the longest flight lasting fifty-nine seconds. Then a gust of wind tumbled it and it never flew again. The aircraft now on display in the Smithsonian is that original Flyer, preserved but never rebuilt.
The nineteen oh five Flyer III was different. After two years of incremental development and dozens of test flights at Huffman Prairie, eight miles east of downtown Dayton, the Wrights had solved the control problems that made the earlier machines erratic. The Flyer III could be banked, circled, and figure-eighted with precision. On October fifth, nineteen oh five, Wilbur flew it for thirty-nine minutes and twenty-three seconds, covering about twenty-four miles in circles over a cow pasture. A small crowd of witnesses watched. The age of practical aviation had arrived, not in a desert in North Carolina but in an Ohio farm field, nearly two years after Kitty Hawk.
Orville Wright personally oversaw the aircraft's restoration and planned its installation at Carillon Park before his death in January of nineteen forty-eight. He did not live to see the park open in nineteen fifty. The Flyer III was restored again in two thousand in preparation for the centennial of powered flight. It is displayed with its engine running, or rather, mounted so that visitors can see the chain-drive system, the hip-cradle control, and the thin muslin wing fabric that held together over Huffman Prairie while the brothers taught themselves to truly fly.
