Up in the Air With Orville

There are many ways to "catch the flying bug." One of the most common occurs when a pilot offers a nonpilot a ride in his airplane. If this ever happened to you (since you're reading AOPA Pilot today) chances are good that you said, "You bet!" Chances are also good that the pilot was certified by the FAA and his airplane was a certificated airframe.

So imagine, for a moment, the same situation but with slightly altered circumstances. Imagine that the pilot has never taken a flying lesson in his life and knows nothing about aerodynamics other than what he has taught himself through trial and error. Imagine that the airplane is home-built, the most recent in a succession of airframes built by this self-taught pilot because he keeps modifying the control system and all his previous airplanes have been destroyed in flying accidents. And finally, imagine that the seat you are offered is a wooden chair bolted to the wing, without cockpit or cowling surrounding it, and not even a seat belt to hold you in place. Still interested?

I know of a man who said, "You bet!" under the exact circumstances I've just described. He was my great-uncle, Arthur Ruhl, a feature writer for Collier's Weekly in the early decades of the twentieth century. And the pilot who took him for his first thrill ride was Orville Wright.

The story begins in May 1908. The Wright brothers had returned to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, to test a two-man machine built according to contract specifications for the Army Signal Corps. My great-uncle was one of six journalists watching surreptitiously from a stand of trees a half-mile away. At the time, the Wrights were still secretive about their invention and refused to fly in front of witnesses (which fueled doubts about their claims of successful flights) so the journalists stayed out of sight.

They watched two flights, including the first two-man flight the Wrights had ever attempted. As Uncle Arthur's article in the May 30 edition of Collier's describes it: "A hundred yards away, the great bird swung to the right and swept grandly by, broadside on. Some cows grazing on the beach grass threw their heads upward, and whirling about, galloped away in terror ahead of the approaching machine. It swept on far above them indifferently, approached the sand hills three-quarters of a mile to the left, rose to them, soared over and down the other side."

Uncle Arthur was clearly thrilled by what he saw. He sent a copy of his article, "History at Kill Devil Hill," to the Wright brothers and received a warm reply from Orville. "I thought your account of the maneuverings of the newspaper men at Kill Devil Hills the most interesting thing I have ever seen concerning our experiments," Orville wrote. Pretty high praise.

Perhaps it was these kind words from Orville that emboldened my uncle to make his next contact in September 1908. Orville was then in Washington, D.C., flying the acceptance trials for the Army, and on September 9 he had taken up his first passenger. Uncle Arthur wrote him and asked to be taken up for a flight. Orville's handwritten reply appears on Cosmos Club stationery.

Sep. 14, 1908

My dear Mr. Ruhl:

I have your letter, and I am sure it would give me great pleasure to take you up with me in our machine, but I have had so many requests that I hardly see how I can take you without giving offense to others. I am limiting the number of passengers to the Army officials at present. I am sorry that you were not able to remain to see some of the flights, but hope you may be able to come down again.

Very truly yours

Orville Wright

Strong winds prevented Orville from flying for several days. On September 17, his next flight after writing my uncle, Orville took Lt. Thomas Selfridge up as his passenger. One of the propellers separated, sliced a guy wire, and caused the machine to crash. Selfridge was killed.

A more timid man might have abandoned his hopes of flying right then and there. But not Arthur Ruhl. When Orville recovered from injuries sustained in the accident and returned to work in May 1909, he found a letter waiting for him. Uncle Arthur still wanted to take a flight. Orville again refused.

Orville wrote back: We shall not be able to make any flights before we go to Washington, and once we get to work there we shall have to devote every flight to teaching our pupils. Besides if we take one passenger we will be besieged with requests from people whom it will be almost impossible to refuse. You will readily see how much embarrassment it will make us if we begin to take passengers. It would give us pleasure to take you for a little spin, in recompense for the suffering you endured, on "the firing line" but we do not see how we can do it. We shall be glad to see you in Washington if you find it convenient to be there while we are at work on our government contract.

But that's not the end of the story. In 1910, the Wrights decided to enter the exhibition business. Americans weren't buying airplanes but they were paying to watch others fly them. So the real money in aviation was out on the flying circuit. In order to compete in as many events as possible, Orville started training pilots for the Wright brothers team. Instruction was conducted at Huffman Prairie, a hummocky pasture eight miles outside of Dayton. And once again, Arthur Ruhl was there to cover the story for Collier's Weekly.

For a nonpilot writing in 1910, Uncle Arthur's understanding of aerodynamics was impressive. In the Collier's article, he writes: "One of the first things to learn, of course, is that the air isn't the simple homogeneous medium it seems to be. It boils and shifts and swirls as current fights tide, and the aeroplane is sailing, not across the stream, but through it.

"Take, for instance, this peaceful cow pasture on a bright June morning. The sky is an even blue and the solitary tree across the field seems drenched in slumbering sunshine. Yet, as a matter of fact, any one of many interesting things are happening near that tree. Maybe the air is streaking up from it as it would streak up a chimney flue, or swirling round it as water swirls around a rock, and if you are flying into the wind and at the tree, the wind may come pouring down over it and upon you like an invisible waterfall."

Uncle Arthur also seems to have understood the Wrights' control system pretty well. "The wings and vertical rudder work together in their machine. The same pull which depresses the left wing-tip and increases its angle of incidence — gives it a firmer grip on the air, so to say — lifts the right wing-tip and lightens its grip accordingly; at the same time the rear rudder turns to the right, thus tending to counteract the combined drag and lift of the wings and bring the machine back to an even keel."

Uncle Arthur watched Orville train his students until the sun edged toward the horizon. "And then he gave an invitation which had been sought ever since a baking spring morning two years ago, when six weary and tick-bitten correspondents rowed, waded, tramped, and crawled for several hours to a spot under Kill Devil Hill and there saw the Wright machine in successful flight across the Kitty Hawk sands. 'You're elected,' said Orville and I climbed in.

"The passenger's seat in the Wright machine is in the middle. The engine is at his right, and the driver is at his left, so that the balance is the same whether an extra man is carried or not. You sit on a small wooden seat with a back, grasp one of the uprights with your right hand, and rest your feet on a cross-bar. Although not fastened in, one is pretty safely caged by a guy-wire, which passes diagonally across and close to one's chest."

Thus seated, wearing a three-piece suit and jaunty cap, Uncle Arthur headed for the heavens.

"Curious and rather uncanny air trends strike the machine more or less continually as it flies. From the way it vibrates, from the little flapping pennant in front, most of all from an instinct which can only be acquired by experience, the veteran knows pretty well what is happening and how to meet it. But as the novice feels himself suddenly boosted up or dropped with a sensation much like that felt when an elevator suddenly drops or rises, he can only sit tight and trust the man beside him.

"And it was up here, about three hundred feet in the air, that Orville treated me to the only maneuver which a regular bird-man could, I suppose, have regarded as remotely in the nature of an adventure. For any one tired of life and listlessly seeking a new sensation, I can thoroughly recommend it. Just get the Wrights to take you up a few hundred feet, and then as you hang there above the abyss, like a lamb in a condor's claws, bring the great bird up standing and stiffly 'banked,' swing it around in a diameter of, say, two hundred feet."

Imagine that. Uncle Arthur, sitting on a seat with no seat belt, up in the air for the first time in his life, flying at about the height of a 30-story building — and Orville puts the plane into a tight banked turn. I don't know how you would have felt and I'm not sure how I would have felt. But my great-uncle loved it! His article, titled "Up in the Air With Orville," is filled with his joy from the experience.

"Thus we slid down, faster than ever now, with the wind blowing the tears out of our eyes; and just before touching ground came up with exquisite ease and went skimming round the field just tickling the weed tops. It was now that we seemed, indeed, to be going like the wind — a wonderful sensation, like nothing else, so near to the earth, yet spurning it. Twice around the field we went, keeping an even distance from the ground, as if on an invisible track, and then Orville shut off the engine and we slid down upon the grass just as a duck on the wing slides into water." Wow.

Arthur Ruhl died in 1935 and his files were packed into boxes that went into storage for more than 60 years. I recently came into possession of his papers, which include both articles for Collier's, three letters from Orville Wright, and a note from Katherine Wright, the brothers' sister, thanking Arthur for some sweet peas he brought to dinner at the Wrights' home on Hawthorne Street in Dayton.

Tom Simmons of Waterford, Virginia, is an ultralight pilot and screenwriter.