"Success four flights Thursday morning all against twenty one mile wind started from Level with engine power alone average speed through air thirty-one miles longest 57 second inform press home Christmas Orville Wright." This famous century-old telegram from the Wright brothers to their father in Dayton may have been the world's first informal METAR. Right up front, where it ranks in importance, Orville emphasizes the wind's role in the historic first flights.
Although it is often documented obliquely, we can ascertain from the historical record that the Wrights must certainly have been preoccupied with surface winds. From their earliest kite-flying experiments in the summer of 1899 they knew that a steady headwind made for the best flights. Too little wind and the airfoils wouldn't sustain flight. Too much, or too variable in direction and speed, and the wind would render the kite uncontrollable. For the Wrights' early aircraft, the wind was both creator and destroyer.
By summer's end the Wrights had determined that wing-warping held great promise for lateral control. But there was a problem: The winds in Dayton were too changeable. Wind shifts frequently sent their kites racing to terra firma. A better test site had to be found, one with steady winds averaging 16 miles per hour, one that was so isolated the Wrights could fly in secrecy, and one that had forgiving terrain in case of crashes. From the outset, these characteristics argued for a beach. At the dawn of the twentieth century most beaches were lonely, hardscrabble places — perfect for avoiding prying eyes. And as is still the case, onshore breezes were the rule.
Octave Chanute, a well-known railroad engineer with an interest in flight and an early advisor to the Wrights, suggested San Diego or Pine Island, Florida, as possible locations — but he worried about the lack of sand dunes. Maybe the Atlantic coasts of South Carolina or Georgia would be better.
On November 27, 1899, the Wrights wrote to the U.S. Weather Bureau for information about suitable flying sites. On December 4, Willis L. Moore, chief of the Weather Bureau, sent the Wrights data on wind velocities in various parts of the nation. He enclosed copies of the Bureau's Monthly Weather Review for August and September 1899.
The Wrights scoured maps of the Atlantic coast and noticed that the U.S. Coast Guard maintained stations at seven-mile intervals along North Carolina's Outer Banks; some had weather reporting capabilities. And there were sand dunes in the Kitty Hawk area.
On August 3, 1900, a letter was sent to Joseph J. Dosher of the Kitty Hawk Weather Bureau station, inquiring about conditions there. Dosher responded on August 16, mentioning plentiful sand dunes, a one-mile-wide beach clear of trees, and north and northeasterly winds. There were no houses to rent, he added, so the Wrights would have to bring a tent.
Dosher showed the Wrights' letter to a neighbor, William J. Tate. Tate took it upon himself to contact the Wrights in an August 18 letter. Tate made a sort of sales pitch, and went into greater detail than Dosher had. He spoke of a stretch of sand one mile wide and five miles long, with an 80-foot hill in the middle and no bushes or trees to break the wind flow. "You can reach here from Elizabeth City, N.C., direct from Manteo 12 miles from here by mail boat every Mon., Wed., and Friday," he wrote. Board was available too, if there weren't too many in the party. Then he offered his help in providing for the Wrights' success.
That did it. After reading the letter the Wrights settled on Kitty Hawk.
The Wrights' personal introduction to the winds of the Outer Banks came with Wilbur's first trip to Kitty Hawk in September 1900. He boarded a leaky, tattered, flat-bottomed schooner at Elizabeth City, bound for the wharf at Kitty Hawk. The trip started out uneventfully, but a gale came up. It ripped the mainsail loose, waves broke over the bow, all hands set to bailing, and the ship nearly ran aground. A rattled Wilbur landed two days later at Kitty Hawk.
The wind showed its ugly side during that first summer of glider testing. Many days, the winds blew stronger than expected, frequently exceeding 30 mph. Wind-blown sand invaded the Wrights' living and working areas the entire time of their experiments. On October 10 the glider was upset by a gust of wind. After three days of repairs, it was flying again. The Wrights left Kitty Hawk on October 23, leaving the glider behind. When they returned in July 1901 they found the glider destroyed by a 93-mph gale. And the wind had lowered the summit of the launching dune by 25 feet.
Days-long spells of high winds and rain marked the 1901 flying season, but in 1902 the Wrights had five "perfect days" of gliding, according to their notes. In two days more than 250 glides were made, Orville wrote his sister. "We had a wind of about 16 meters per second or about 30 miles an hour and glided in it without any trouble. That was the highest wind a machine was ever in, so that now we hold all kinds of records." Between September 19 and October 24, another "700 to 1,000" glides were made, according to a diary.
The historic 1903 season, of course, was also marked by adverse conditions. Upon their arrival in September, the Wrights found the previous season's storage shed blown off its foundation by winter winds. A new one had to be built. On October 18 a four-day-long "cyclone" set in, setting new records for wind velocity and running five ships aground. The Outer Banks' reputation as the "graveyard of the Atlantic" is well deserved.
At one point the wind was so bad that the roof of the Wrights' building started to give way. To prevent further damage, Orville went out in the wind and rain, then climbed up a ladder to nail down some loose boards. Wilbur steadied the ladder and became annoyed at Orville's slow progress. Later, Orville explained that the wind was so strong it blew the hammer around; three out of four blows hit the roof or his fingers instead of the nails.
The morning of December 17, the Wrights ventured from their shed and checked the wind. According to some accounts, they had a small portable anemometer that Octave Chanute had given them. The anemometer read between 22 and 27 mph. This would be a high wind for the Flyer, so the brothers were cautious. They rechecked the wind every five minutes until 10 o'clock. It was still blowing hard. The weather had worsened overnight, and now there was an overcast. One account mentioned the air being almost empty of birds.
As they waited, hoping for the wind to slacken, wind whistled through the cracks in the shed's boards, sending sand inside. The next turn at flying was Orville's. He said he was willing to take a chance, in spite of the wind.
Before every flying session, the Wrights would run up a signal flag, visible to the nearby Coast Guard lifesaving station. This was also a signal to the rest of the inhabitants — to come gawk at the goings-on.
Temperatures and wind chills were so low that the brothers had to return to the shed to warm their hands as they laid the track to transport the Flyer to its launch site. The wind whistled through the craft's wire bracing.
The four flights that followed changed the world. But the wind had the last word.
The last flight — Wilbur's, and the longest, lasting 59 seconds while covering 852 feet (Orville's telegram was off by two seconds) — ended with a hard landing and a cracked elevator. The Flyer was carried back to camp and set down in the open. There would be two more days of repair work to the elevator, then it would be Orville's turn at the controls.
The Wrights and the locals who had come to watch were huddled in a group, talking, as the wind rose above an estimated 30 mph. There was a shout of alarm. All turned toward the Flyer. Some ran to it.
A gust of wind had lifted the Flyer and thrown it backwards. Wilbur tried to grab a skid to stop it from overturning, but he couldn't hold on. A local, John Daniels, said that the Flyer "tumbled like an umbrella turned inside-out and loose in the wind." Daniels tried to jump out of the Flyer's way, but ended up between the wings, ensnared by the wire bracing.
The Flyer went end over end. "I can't tell to save my life," Daniels reportedly said, "how it all happened, but I found myself caught up in them wires, and the machine blowing across the beach and heading for the ocean, landing first on one end and then the other, rolling over and over, and me getting tangled up in it all the time. When the thing did stop for a second I nearly broke up every wire and upright getting out of it."
The Wrights walked the four or five miles to the nearest Coast Guard weather station to send the historic telegram. The weather station's recording anemometer would provide the official wind observations for the time of the flights. The anemometer, manufactured by the Julien P. Friez company of Baltimore, marked the winds as coming from the northeast at 21 knots. (Friez's company, The Belfort Instrument Company, exists today. The company was renamed after the Belfort Observatory in Baltimore, which Friez founded.)
The wind direction and velocity for Kitty Hawk on December 17, 1903, are the only accurate, empirical records of that day's weather. Remember, the U.S. Weather Bureau (the precursor to today's National Weather Service) hadn't been established until 1870. Before then, simultaneous surface weather observations weren't collected or communicated. As for synoptic meteorology, at the time of the Wrights' first flight meteorologists were still searching for some mechanism that would explain why certain cloud and precipitation types were associated with storms. The concept of fronts, low-pressure models, storm circulations, and interactions of air masses of different densities wouldn't come until 1919, when Norwegian meteorologists gave us the modern theories that endure today.
Without today's observational and analytical advantages, what can we say about the synoptic situation at Kitty Hawk 100 years ago? Very little. It amounts to guesswork, so guesses (educated, of course) are in order.
Strong winds are common along the Outer Banks, especially in the winter months. On one visit to Kill Devil Hills (an adjoining town that's the true location of the first flight) I was told that many overwintering natives get in the habit of playing their radios at high volume. Keeps the wind's howl from getting on your nerves, they say.
What about the wind's direction — from the northeast? A nor'easter — a low-pressure system off the coast — could explain that. But while there's mention of overcast skies, there was apparently no precipitation, something that nearly always accompanies coastal storms. The "cyclone" of October 18, on the other hand, almost certainly was a coastal storm of the nor'easter variety.
A "dry" nor'easter might explain the wind, but not the overcast. A dry nor'easter is really a high-pressure system located off the coast and to the north. It's the clockwise flow off the southerly quadrants of the high that brings strong northeasterly winds to Atlantic shores. There's strong wind, but relatively cloud-free skies.
Was it a post-cold-frontal situation? Not likely. Winds would have been out of the westerly or northwesterly points of the compass. Post-warm-front? Nope. Winds would have been out of the south. Pre-warm-front? Maybe, if the parent low were to the southwest. The counterclockwise flow around the low would have brought strong winds to bear on Kitty Hawk. And the uniform overcast explains what sounds like a high stratus layer — something typical of pre-warm-front conditions.
I favor the dry nor'easter or pre-warm-front explanations. In the end, however, it doesn't really matter. The weather was what it was. In those days, you looked up and made your move. What mattered that day was that two optimistic low-time pilots decided to take a chance and launch into stiff winds, knowing that they'd need all the skill and luck they could muster, and knowing that the wind might deal them a bad hand. In that, today's pilots have a lot in common with the Wrights. We just need less luck. Some of us, anyway.
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