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Site of Man's First Powered Flight The Wright brothers, Wilbur and Orville, bicycle shop owners and tinkerers from Dayton, Ohio, first became interested in the idea of manned flight near the end of the nineteenth century. In 1990, when Wilbur was thirty-three and Orville twenty-nine, they built a glider and began looking for a place with appropriate winds to test it. They chose the windswept sand dunes of North Carolina's Outer Banks, and in the fall of that year, they set up camp near Kill Devil Hills and began their experiments. The returned each fall for the next two years with new gliders and broke all records for glider experiments at that time: largest flown, longest in the air, smallest angle of descent, flight in highest wind. They also built the first wind tunnel to use in their experiments. Those experiments convinced them that a motor-powered manned craft could fly, and in 1903 they built such a craft and returned to Kill Devil Hills with it that fall. They suffered many problems and frustrations, causing them to stay longer than usual. But on December 14, with Wilbur at the controls, their spindly craft almost cleared the wooden launching ramp before it stalled. They were certain it would fly, however, and after a day of repairs to the machine and another day of waiting for the right winds, they made another attempt. At 10:30 AM, December 17, their plane carried Orville aloft for twelve seconds, a distance of 100 feet, man's first flight in a powered craft. They took turns flying it three more times that morning. The last flight carried Wilbur 852 feet in 57 seconds. Soon after the flights, a gust of wind caught the unanchored plane and flipped it end over end, wrecking it. The Wright Brothers National Memorial, an imposing granite structure overlooking the site of the first flight, is on the US-158 bypass at milepost 7. The visitors center and museum contains a full-scale model of the Wrights' first plane. Their camp and the wooden runway have been reconstructed at the original site. Each year on the first weekend in May a fly-in is held at the memorial, attracting more than 300 planes, some among the rarest and most unusual on earth.
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