On the morning of December 17, 1903, two bicycle mechanics from Ohio flew an airplane four times on a sand dune in the Outer Banks. They sent their father a telegram. Western Union misspelled Orville's name. The granite monument is sixty feet tall now, and pilots fly here just to land.
A Pirep featured story · KFFA First Flight, Kill Devil Hills, NC
Wilbur and Orville Wright ran a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio. They had no engineering degree between them and no patron. They financed everything by selling bicycles. Starting in 1900, they came to the Outer Banks of North Carolina every summer for four years because the U.S. Weather Bureau told them Kitty Hawk had the steady winds and soft-landing sand dunes they needed to test gliders. They camped in a wooden shed with their workshop, built their own wind tunnel back home in Dayton to generate the data they needed, and made over a thousand controlled glides off Big Kill Devil Hill before they trusted their design enough to put an engine on it.
Their employee, Charlie Taylor, built them a four-cylinder, twelve-horsepower gasoline engine — 200 pounds. They machined their own propellers (the first true aerial propellers anyone had ever built) from three laminations of spruce. The fabric on the wings was cotton muslin, the same kind used for women's underwear. The complete machine weighed about 605 pounds. They called it the Flyer.
On the morning of December 17, 1903, with the wind blowing more than 20 mph and ice in the puddles, John Daniels of the Kill Devil Hills Life-Saving Station stood by the camera Orville had set up on a tripod, waiting for the signal. At 10:35 AM, Orville opened the throttle, lay prone on the lower wing with his hips in the wing-warping cradle, and the Flyer lifted off into headwind. Wilbur ran alongside. The flight lasted 12 seconds and covered 120 feet at about 6.8 miles per hour. They took turns. Four flights that morning. The longest, the fourth, was Wilbur — 852 feet in 59 seconds. After the last flight a gust caught the Flyer on the ground, rolled it over, and damaged it beyond repair.
That afternoon the brothers walked to the Kitty Hawk weather bureau office and sent their father a telegram. The operator made two errors transmitting it. Orville's name came through as "Orevelle." The 59-second flight was rendered as 57 seconds. None of it mattered. The telegram reached Bishop Milton Wright in Dayton that evening.
The site is now Wright Brothers National Memorial, owned by the National Park Service. The 60-foot granite pylon on top of Kill Devil Hill is visible from miles offshore. Four numbered granite markers along the level ground record the distance of each of the four flights. And on land owned by the Park Service, in the only general aviation airport in the United States operated by the National Park Service, there is a 3,000-foot asphalt runway called First Flight Airport. There is no fuel, no tower, no FBO. Pilots come anyway. It is the only place to land where it actually happened.