I'm bouncing around the pattern at Lincoln Park, New Jersey, in my rental steed, a Cessna 172. The runway measures 2,942 by 40 feet, there's a row of 40-foot trees up ahead, and a 15-knot quartering headwind blows from the right. With 0.5 on the Hobbs this is going to be my last landing of the day. On final, with 20 degrees of flaps, I press the right rudder and dip the right wing into the wind and chop power right over the highway, and just before the 172 touches down I let up on the right rudder and level the wings; it straightens out, the tires squeak, and I make the first turnoff. And I don't even have to lean on the brakes.
What really stands out about this landing, aside from the sheer luck of my performing it well and the relative lack of expense for the whole session, is just how beautifully the controls work. I barely think about them; or rather, I just think about a maneuver and it just happens.
That wasn't always the case.
The Wright brothers, or rather Wilbur, seemed to be the first to realize that air has three dimensions. It's just that simple. Before them, and for a few years after their successful powered flight in 1903, no one figured out that an aircraft needed yaw, pitch, and roll to fly well. Early inventors all equipped their flying machines with rudders and elevators, sure, but nothing to roll the wings. Those earliest man-carrying flying machines had some type of control to lift and lower the nose, often a lever moving backward and forward. Made sense. Something turned the airplane, too. Maybe divergent thrust. That's what machine-gun inventor Hiram Maxim used on his 1894 twin-engine flying machine, which never actually got off the ground.
To keep the wings leveled in the tumultuous atmosphere, as well as bank — which Wilbur observed buzzards doing by flexing their wing tips — the brothers built what they called "wing warping" into all their airplanes. The wing tips flexed. Easy enough. Since they also laid down flat on the bottom wing of their early biplane machines, to shed every possible ounce of drag, on their first glider the brothers installed a kick bar, operated by their feet, to warp the wings. To dip the left wing the pilot pressed his right foot against the kick bar; to dip the right wing he used his left foot. The glider also was missing a rudder. (And so was their next one. After all, did you ever see a bird with a vertical tail surface? The Wrights hadn't.) All their early machines had elevators, but mounted in front. To control that, they installed a lever mounted within arm's length on the lower wing; pushing it forward raised the machine and pulling it back lowered it.
"The entire 1900 glider was counterintuitive," says Nick Engler, director of the Wright Brothers Aeroplane Co., an educational foundation based in Dayton. The company builds flying replicas and tours the nation's museums. Engler has logged about 800 hours — and less than a tenth of an hour of it is in Wright replicas. The replicas just don't stay up that long.
In their next glider, built and flown in 1901, the Wrights retained the kick-bar system but made it more intuitive. Now pushing with the left foot dipped the left wing, and vice versa. The elevator control remained the same: Forward for up, backward for down. But on the 1902 glider they finally modified the elevator lever to work pretty much the way it works today: Pull back, the nose raises. Push down, the nose lowers. Now, though, they got rid of the kick bar and replaced it with a hip cradle: Sliding the cradle left with the hip dipped the left wing, and vice versa. This was their first flying machine to have a rudder, and the brothers linked it to the wing warping, and thus to the hip cradle.
By their third powered machine, built in 1905, the Wrights believed they had flight perfected. The aircraft could stay up long enough to run out of gas — 39 minutes. And that was so long that Wilbur, lying prone, resting on his elbows with his head tilted back, had to be helped from the airplane.
"There was nothing to help them hold their head up," says Engler. "Lie on the floor and hold your head up for 39 minutes. That's what they're doing." The brothers stopped flying publicly until the patent for the flying machine came through, which prevented others from copying it without paying them royalties. After the brothers had received the patent, the U.S. Army asked Orville Wright to demonstrate the flying machine in 1908, while Wilbur took one to France to fly it for a syndicate there. In both cases the airplane was modified to carry two people, both sitting upright.
To practice for the upcoming demonstrations, the brothers rebuilt the 1905 machine in 1908 with seating for two, and that meant they had to alter the controls once again. They kept the left-hand lever to operate the elevator, sure. But to substitute for the hip cradle, Orville added two more levers, both operated with the right hand. The outside right-hand lever controlled wing warping; the inside right lever controlled the rudder.
"For some reason the Wright brothers would never consider using their feet to steer with," Engler says. That's because they didn't wear seat belts — no one did — and they had to push their feet against a crossbar mounted in front to stay in the seat, especially during landing. Wilbur had a tough time operating Orville's two right-hand levers, so he designed his own, and took it on tour in France and Italy. Wilbur started by mounting a single right-hand stick on a gimbal. To move the rudder left he pushed the stick left, then pushed it forward to dip the left wing; he pushed the stick right to add right rudder, and back to dip the right wing.
"For the rest of time they called it a 'Wilbur' control system," Engler adds. "Buyers could order either an 'Orville' or a 'Wilbur.'" Orvilles were popular in the United States and Germany (where Orville demonstrated the flying machine in 1909) and Wilburs were sought after in France and Italy. "Orville never flew a 'Wilbur,' and Wilbur never flew an 'Orville,'" he says. They also trained the first instructors — who had to learn how to fly with the left-hand stick in the right hand and the right-hand stick in the left. A nightmare? "Yes, it is," Engler says. "The surprise is they both died in bed." If you want to crash one for yourself, the Wright Brothers Aeroplane Co. has a simulator.
"Our Wright reproductions are mainly flown by test pilots from the F-16 through the F-22 Raptor," he adds. "Every single one of them have said these are the most difficult machines they've ever flown."
Meanwhile, Glenn Curtiss began building airplanes in his hometown, Hammondsport, New York, at the southern tip of Keuka Lake. At the time, Curtiss was nationally known as "the fastest man alive." In 1907 he set the world speed record of 136 miles per hour on a motorcycle of his own design. That's what he did: designed and raced motorcycles.
That same year Curtiss also joined the Aerial Experiment Association, led by famed telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell. The AEA's first powered machine, the 1908 Red Wing (red was the color of its silk fabric, leftover from one of Bell's experiments), had pitch control, but no lateral control. It didn't fly so well, either. For Curtiss and Bell's next contraption, the 1908 White Wing (guess what color its wings were), AEA member F.W. Baldwin wrote, "In this machine, it was deemed advisable to get some positive method of controlling lateral stability." Curtiss devised the controls for such a system: a shoulder yoke.
"Curtiss was a motorcycle guy," explains Jim Poel, who's flown a replica Curtiss A-1 Triad, the first amphibian and first U.S. Navy aircraft. "He came up with the idea of leaning." Poel, a 37-year veteran of the airlines, has logged 25,000 hours. Of that, three minutes are in the Triad replica. "With the shoulder yoke, basically your chair rocks back and forth, left and right," he explains. So what about controlling the other two axes? Just in front of the pilot is a stick with a steering wheel. "The wheel operates the rudder," Poel says. "The push and pull on the stick controls the canard [mounted in front of the pilot] and the elevator [mounted in back]." The throttle and brakes on the typical early Curtiss airplane were based on the newfangled automobile's: The right foot pressed the accelerator, and the left foot activated the brake — a wooden block that rubbed against the front wheel.
With all his experience flying normal controls, Poel found the Curtiss system a bit of a handful. "If two things cropped up at once," he says, "[for example] a problem with pitch and the wing going down, you wind up involuntarily going back to the old controls. If you have multiple problems it's hard to stay focused." One thing he didn't have trouble getting used to: the gas pedal. Still, "if you ask if it was an easy airplane to fly, I'd have to say no," Poel adds.
In Europe, an entire ocean away, the indigenous builders' control systems evolved differently despite Wilbur's demonstrations. The 1910 Hanriot — which Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome in New York has a replica of — had a right-hand stick that moved fore and aft for pitch and a left-hand stick that moved from side to side for roll. "It's like rubbing your stomach and patting your head at the same time," says Dan Taylor, an Old Rhinebeck pilot. The Hanriot's rudder control is more familiar — a perpendicular bar that operates like modern rudder controls. Taylor has between 700 and 800 hours in the ancient airplanes. "Remember, the flights [in Rhinebeck's collection of early machines] are very short," Taylor says. During the shows the announcer gets the crowd cheering an airplane to make a 10-second hop.
It was Louis Blériot who finally hit upon the right combination of stick and rudder. It was in his eleventh airplane, the Blériot XI. "The Blériot pretty much is the standard fare, the most normal of all," Taylor says. Like in the Hanriot a rudder bar operates the rudder controls, and the single stick — it was called a cloche — combines pitch-and-roll control.
In 1909 Blériot flew this airplane across the English Channel, and it became big news. Everyone wanted one, so in the following months he sold hundreds, which contributed to the spread of its control system. Many World War I airplanes had the same basic design; virtually all of them shared the Blériot control system. Simple, yet effective — the stick and rudder remains in use nearly 100 years later.
"It's true of all technology: Things start off complicated, and they get simpler," says Rick Young, who's built and flown reproductions of Wright gliders. "Think about how hard it used to be to operate cars." Foot starters, steering-column shifters, powerless steering, hand-cranking the engine...don't get me started.
Phil Scott is a freelance writer and pilot living in New York City.
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