Pilots

No one knows the Wright brothers like Tom Crouch, and he never met either of them. Crouch is the senior curator of aeronautics at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, and his specialty is, yup, the Wrights. Less a high-time pilot and more the official Wright brothers historian, this gentle, cherubic man has written 12 books, including what's perhaps the definitive volume on the brothers, The Bishop's Boys. And yet, despite having grown up on their stomping grounds, Dayton, he wasn't an aficionado until much later.

Sure, as a boy he was interested in airplanes — just not the bailing-wire-and-chewing-gum kind. From his house near Wright Patterson Air Force Base he could watch the Convair B-36 and Northrop YB-49 heavy bombers; as far as he was concerned the neatest airplane ever was the North American F-86 Sabre. He spent summers riding his bike to the Air Force Museum, and he would occasionally tread around Huffman Prairie, where the Wrights flew their second and third powered machines (see " Postcards: Inventing Flight," April Pilot). And some Sundays he and his Boy Scout troop would perform the flag ceremony at Carillon Park. He'd look in on the Wright relics that found their final resting place there, including the Flyer 3.

In graduate school Crouch found his life's work. It happened one day in the early 1970s, sitting in the reading room of the Library of Congress. Marvin McFarland, who edited the authoritative two-volume Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright, walked up to Crouch's desk. "Mac," as Crouch calls him, handed him the address and phone number of Ivonette Wright Miller, a niece of the brothers, and encouraged him to visit her and inspect the reams of Wright papers in her basement. Crouch showed up at her door in Dayton, and she welcomed him into her house. He spent hours down in the basement, paging through records both personal and public, photographs formal and informal. At the end of each day she invited him to have tea and talk all about her famous uncles. She even arranged for him to spend the night in their post-fame mansion, Hawthorne Hill. Crouch became hooked on the Wrights.

Then in 1974 Mac introduced Crouch to Rick Young, who built exact replicas of the Wright gliders from the 1900 aircraft without a tail to perhaps the brothers' most graceful glider, the 1902 aircraft that encouraged them to add an engine and thus take off into history. Young invited Crouch to travel from Washington, D.C., down to the Outer Banks of North Carolina and try out his gliders.

Back in the Wrights' day the Outer Banks was the perfect spot for experimenting because it was so windy, sand-covered, crash-worthy, and remote. Today, however, the area is packed to the teeth with vacation homes, souvenir shops, and paved roads.

While Crouch didn't get much of a chance to fly Young's replicas he learned a lot about them. "It's been enough to crew them," he says. "The act of us carrying the '02 glider diagonally across the face of a dune — two steps forward and three back, everyone cussing under their breath — of holding its wings in high winds, of actually being one of the Wrights' helpers, it taught me that kind of thing. Not the problems the brothers faced, but what hard work that was." And, he adds, "I remember seeing a perfect Outer Banks sunset.

"I never would have known looking at papers and photographs about what it was like to launch the glider, feel it coming to life," he says. "It's not like Civil War reenacting — those guys never have to face real bullets. When you're down there with the Wright gliders, you're doing exactly what they did. You're seeing it in real time and in living color."

It wasn't all Wright-brother-style accommodation, though; forget the tents and the telegraphs home. Crouch and company stayed in one of those vacation houses. So that begs the question: Would Crouch want to travel back in time to witness that first flight, with the wind blowing a gale and Orville lying on the bottom wing and Wilbur running alongside the right wing to stabilize the machine as the Flyer took off and flew 120 feet into history? Well, he would like to have seen what the Wrights were like when they were just anonymous bicycle mechanics. And he would like to have heard their voices, forever left unrecorded at their insistence. But otherwise, nah.

"We wouldn't learn anything. We have photographs of three of the four flights, we have accounts of three of five witnesses," he says. "I wouldn't do much more than get cold."