What the two brothers are still teaching us
This month, a lot of attention will be focused on Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, as the world celebrates the Centennial of Flight. There will be speeches and musical performances, skydivers and flyovers. There will be a lot of history, and a lot of hoopla. The world should celebrate the Wrights' accomplishments. That first flight 100 years ago profoundly changed civilization.
As I reflect on what they did, it strikes me that how they did it is still the best model for achieving aviation success today.
They started with passion. You cannot achieve success unless you care deeply about what you're doing. You can see their passion in what Wilbur wrote in 1900 to Octave Chanute, then the leading expert on man's attempts to fly. "For some years I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man," Wilbur wrote. "My disease has increased in severity and I feel that it will soon cost me an increased amount of money if not my life. I have been trying to arrange my affairs in such a way that I can devote my entire time for a few months to experiment in this field."
Here's the next piece of the aviation success model: reaching out for help and information. In contacting Chanute, Wilbur was also seeking advice, and more important, a mentor. Chanute did mentor the brothers, corresponding with them regularly and even visiting their camp on North Carolina's Outer Banks. They credited him with inspiring them to pursue their passion.
Mentors are still important in learning to fly. All pilots hit points during their training-and even later, during their flying careers-where they can't seem to make progress. An experienced pilot can give you the advice and encouragement you may need to help you through those times.
If you don't already have a mentor, consider seeking out another pilot at the airport and asking him or her to help you. AOPA's Project Pilot program offers a wealth of resources for students and mentors. We can even help you find a mentor with our online "find a mentor" service.
The Wrights read everything they could get their hands on. They hounded libraries and research institutions and built their own aviation library. The brothers also seemed to have an uncanny ability to judge the information, discarding the myths and integrating bits and pieces of data.
Today there is a mind-boggling wealth of information on aviation. But just as the Wright brothers had to do, the trick is to sort out what is truly useful and what can help you advance toward your goals.
Unlike the Wrights, you don't have to contact hundreds of different people to assemble your information library, nor do you have to decide what's good and bad. Just about everything you need is available online. The editors of this magazine have collected online resources for students and CFIs. There, for example, you'll find links to AOPA's Guide to Learning to Fly and hundreds of other specific information resources.
You can search the archives of AOPA Flight Training and AOPA Pilot magazines to find articles on whatever your question may be. You'll find links to the AOPA Air Safety Foundation's innovative online training programs, and you can order ASF materials that you may want for your own library. There are subject reports from AOPA's Aviation Services department.
For your "real time" information needs, AOPA offers tools ranging from online weather graphics to AOPA's Airport Directory Online. Most exciting is AOPA's new Real-Time Flight Planner with graphical TFRs. You'll read more about this next month, but in brief, this program allows you to rubber-band your route around current temporary flight restrictions and overlay radar and satellite images on your route. It's free to AOPA members.
The final piece of the Wright model is to work incrementally-to master one thing and then move on to the next. The Wrights were methodical. They identified the milestones they would have to hit before they could reach their final goal. That's the same way you should approach your flight training. Each step builds on the last, until you join the Wrights in the mastery of flight.
Darrell Collins, the highly respected historian at the Wright Brothers National Memorial, has said, "Before the Wright brothers, no one in aviation did anything fundamentally right. Since the Wright brothers, no one has done anything fundamentally different." The Wrights got it right.
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