Orville took hold of an upright bar at the end of the right wings, ready to help balance the whole affair when it started forward on the track.
Then off they went, Orville running as fast as he could, holding on until no longer able to keep up.
But at the end of the track, Wilbur made a mistake. Pulling too hard on the rudder, he sent the Flyer surging upward at too steep an angle. To compensate, he nosed it downward, but again too abruptly and the machine hit the sand a hundred feet from the end of the track.
The brothers were elated. Motor, launching device, everything had proven reliable. Damage was minor. Wilbur’s error in judgment, from lack of experience with this kind of apparatus, had been the only cause of trouble, as he told the others and explained in a letter to Katharine and the Bishop.
The repairs took two days. Not until late the afternoon of the 16th was the machine ready. While they were setting it up on the track in front of the building, seeing to final adjustments, a stranger wandered by and after looking the machine over, asked what it was.
When we told him it was a flying machine, he asked whether we intended to fly it [Orville would write later]. We said we did, as soon as we had a suitable wind. He looked at it several minutes longer and then, wishing to be courteous, remarked that it looked as if it would fly, if it had a “suitable wind.”
The brothers were much amused, certain that by “suitable wind,” the man had in mind something on the order of the recent 75-mile-an-hour gale.
Only five men showed up the morning of Thursday the 17th, after the brothers hung a white bedsheet on the side of the shed, the signal to the men at the Life-Saving Station that their help was needed. Many, as Orville later explained, were apparently unwilling to face the “rigors of a cold December wind in order to see, as they no doubt thought, another flying machine not fly.”
Those who did turn out felt differently. “We had seen the glider fly without an engine,” remembered John T. Daniels, “and when these boys put an engine in it, we knew that they knew exactly what they were doing.”
Adam Etheridge and Will Dough had come with Daniels from the Life-Saving Station. W. C. Brinkley was a dairy farmer from Manteo, and the fifth, Johnny Moore, was a boy of about eighteen who had happened by and was curious to know about the strange-looking machine.
Daniels, known to be “a joker,” told him it was a “duck-snarer” and explained how any minute Orville would be going up and out over the bay, where there were ducks by the hundreds, and how he would drop a giant net and catch every one. The boy decided to stay and watch.
Bill Tate, to his subsequent regret, was away at the time in Elizabeth City.
The day was freezing cold. Skims of ice covered several nearby ponds. A gusty wind was blowing hard out of the north. “The wind usually blows,” Wilbur had reminded his Chicago audience in June. It was blowing at nearly a gale force of 20 to 27 miles per hour, far from ideal. The difficulty in a high wind was not in making headway in it but maintaining balance.
Reflecting on the moment long afterward, Orville would express utter amazement over “our audacity in attempting flights in a new and untried machine under such circumstances.”
Working together they and the men hauled the Flyer to the launching track, four 15-foot-long two-by-fours sheathed with a metal strip, and laid down this time on a flat, level stretch about 100 feet west of the camp, the track running north-northeast straight into the freezing wind.
With everything in place and ready to go, Wilbur and Orville walked off a short way from the others and stood close talking low for some time under an immense overcast sky. Dressed in their dark caps and dark winter jackets beneath which they wore their customary white shirts, starched white collars, and dark ties, they could as well have been back in Dayton on a winter morning chatting on a street corner.
The other five watched and waited together in silence. They had become “a serious lot,” John T. Daniels remembered. “Nobody felt like talking.”
Because Wilbur had won the toss three days before, it was now Orville’s turn. The two shook hands as if saying goodbye. Then Wilbur went over to the others and told them not to look so glum, but to cheer Orville on his way.
“We tried,” Daniels said, “but it was mighty weak shouting with no heart in it.”
In the time since 1900, when Wilbur had gone off on his first trip to Kitty Hawk bringing a camera as part of his equipment, the brothers had become increasingly interested in photography as essential to their flying experiments. They had even begun selling photographic equipment at the bicycle shop. In 1902 they had made what for them was a major investment of $55.55 in as fine an American-made camera to be had, a large Gundlach Korona V, which used 5 × 7-inch glass plates and had a pneumatic shutter. Early that morning of December 17, Orville had positioned the Korona on its wooden tripod about 30 feet from the end of the starting rail and assigned Daniels to squeeze the rubber bulb to trip the shutter as the Flyer passed that point.
Orville now positioned himself on his stomach at the controls, as Wilbur had, while Wilbur stood to the right at the tip of the lower wing ready to help keep the machine in balance as it started down the track. Minutes passed while the engine warmed up. As they would later emphasize neither had had any “previous acquaintance” with the conduct of the machine and its controlling mechanisms.
At exactly 10:35, Orville slipped the rope restraining the Flyer and it headed forward, but not very fast, because of the fierce headwind, and Wilbur, his left hand on the wing, had no trouble keeping up.
At the end of the track the Flyer lifted into the air and Daniels, who had never operated a camera until now, snapped the shutter to take what would be one of the most historic photographs of the century.
The course of the flight, in Orville’s words, was “extremely erratic.” The Flyer rose, dipped down, rose again, bounced and dipped again like a bucking bronco when one wing struck the sand. The distance flown had been 120 feet, less than half the length of a football field. The total time airborne was approximately 12 seconds.
“Were you scared?” Orville would be asked. “Scared?” he said with a smile. “There wasn’t time.”
“It was only a flight of twelve seconds,” he would also stress later, “and it was an uncertain, wavy, creeping sort of a flight at best, but it was a real flight at last.”
The machine was picked up and carried back to the starting point, after which they all took a short break to warm up inside the camp.