Wright flight re-enactment fails

One hundred years after the Wright brothers’ first flight, an attempt to recreate the moment failed in the USA when a replica craft could not get off the ground and sputtered into the mud.

A second try was later aborted.

Earlier yesterday, a cheer rose from the crowd of 35,000 in North Carolina when the muslin-winged flyer roared to life and began moving down a wooden launch track. But that cheer suddenly turned to a groan when the rickety craft stopped dead in a muddy puddle at the end of the track.

Pilot Kevin Kochersberger dropped his head in apparent chagrin and later laughed as the single-engine plane was hoisted back on the track.

Shortly before 4pm (9pm Irish time), the team started the engines and turned the wooden propellers, then backed off and said their efforts to fly the replica were over.

The re-enactment was originally scheduled for 10.35am (3.35pm Irish time), exactly 100 years to the minute after the brothers, from Dayton, Ohio, made their first tentative hops through the air with a delicate contraption fashioned in their bicycle shop.

The first try was delayed by heavy rain and didn’t come until early afternoon.

Though disappointing, the failed first attempt at a re-enactment was not historically inaccurate. The Wrights also crashed their Wright Flyer, three days before finally getting it off the ground.

Earlier, President George Bush told the drenched crowd at the Wright Brothers National Memorial that the brothers would not have been deterred by a little bad weather.

“On the day they did fly, just like today, the conditions were not ideal,” Bush said.

“The Wright brothers hit some disappointments along the way. There must have been times when they had to fight their own doubts,” he said. “They pressed on, believing in the great work they had begun and in their own capacity to see it though. We would not know their names today if these men had been pessimists.”

Kochersberger, an engineering professor, was piloting a meticulous reproduction of the 1903 Wright Flyer that was built by the Wright Experience, a non-profit group based in Warrenton, Virginia.

There had been speculation that Bush would use the centennial of flight to announce a new mission to the moon, but the White House made clear the President had no such intentions.

Actor John Travolta, introducing Bush, told the President, “not only do I vote for that option, but I volunteer to go on the first mission.”

Bush made no commitments on a new space mission, but said of Travolta: “We shall call him moon man from now on.”

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, delivered the invocation and singer Lee Greenwood performed “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

As Greenwood finished the national anthem, a bald eagle was released in the middle of the field to the cheers of the crowd.

Bush did not stay to see the re-enactment. As his departing Air Force One passed over the park, it dipped its right wing, as if in salute.

On December 17, 1903, Orville was at the controls for that first hop that lasted all of 12 seconds. He and Wilbur alternated for four flights that day the last, by Wilbur, lasted 59 seconds and ran for 255.6 metres.