We went with a lookalike because there are actual replicas.
People have built very close-to-scale replicas of a 1911, 1910 Wright Flyer,
but they found the same problems the Wrights did.
The airplane isn't exactly what you call reliable.
Very often, it crashed.
And frankly, we don't want to have to fix our airplane after every flight.
We don't like the “crash” word.
So we built out of modern materials with modern building techniques,
so that we could fly on a frequent basis.
We'd like to be able to land the airplane and put somebody else on it
and continue flying.
The airplane is very, very close to what a 1911 Wright B Flyer would have looked like.
Once you get 100, 200 feet away from it, if we overfly people,
a 1911 Wright Flyer is what you see.
We're trying to recreate what people in 1911 Dayton, Ohio,
would have seen if Orville or Wilbur had flown over top of them.
And when you're inside the airplane, this is not an open cockpit airplane.
This is a no cockpit airplane.
You are literally sitting in front of the wing, and experiencing flight
the way that people did at the early turn of the century.
The Wrights knew that in order to roll the airplane, they had to change the lift of each wing.
They literally just twisted the wings.
The wood would bend inside the airplane.
They had a small tray that they sat on, and when they shifted their body,
there were wires that were hooked to the ends of the wing,
and that would twist each wing in opposite directions
to be able to give them that lift differential.
The replicas that have flown have done that.
It's incredibly difficult to be able to control.
So to be able to get something where you can
safely and repeatedly do that is very, very, very challenging.
And that's why we went with the ailerons.
The Wrights actually started out as bicycle engineers, if you will.
They were bicycle mechanics.
So they were very familiar with chains.
And when they realized they could only have one engine,
but they needed two propellers to generate
the thrust that they needed to overcome the weight,
they very quickly realized a single chain going to each propeller,
one of them is inverted so that you have counter-rotating propellers,
was the way to do it.
So we've done the same thing on our airplane.
We have one engine, and we have two propellers that are driven
by, frankly, a very, very, very strong and very industrial chain.
Yes, it looks like a bicycle chain, but when you get up close to it,
we've got a pretty solid chain on this airplane for very good reasons.
We have a Lycoming IO390, probably the largest four cylinder
general-aviation engine that we could get to put on the airplane.
So rated at 210 horsepower.
The Wrights had anywhere from 32 to around 40 horsepower,
but sometimes you got a little less,
sometimes you got a little more because they were all hand-built.
It actually flies much like any other conventional general-aviation airplane,
except for the fact that you're not sitting inside of the airplane when you fly.
You and I are both part of the drag equation of this airplane.
You are impacting the drag of the airplane when you stick your hand out and wave.
She's got a personality to her.
And that's why we're required
to go through the flight test process, because the FAA knows
the airplane is going to have a personality.
The FAA has a very rigorous process when you're building even
an experimental airplane.
We loaded the wings down with salt bags to simulate the load of 3½ Gs.
So the airplane, we know can pull 3½ Gs.
You're never going to see 3½ Gs in this airplane.
We've been up to maybe 1.2 Gs in a 30° bank turn,
and that's about as steep as we're going to go,
because we don't need to do anything more than that.
So maybe we overengineered the airplane.
But, you know, to me, when I'm flying it,
that's the kind of stuff I'm really interested in having underneath me.
We get a lot of head turning, we get a lot of waves as we go by.
We're trying to preserve early aviation history.
I've been airborne and I've looked down and there's another airplane
flying underneath of me.
And that's just a view that you don't get from many other airplanes.
Our original airplane, we call the Brown Bird.
It first flew in 1982.
It has flown over 5100 passengers over the years.
Really fun to fly.
But we're going with something now that's a little bit more advanced,
a little bit easier to move around.
A lot of people that have come out over the years
have said, “hey, I'm a pilot, I've got years of experience.
“I would really like to fly your airplane”.
And we don't let other people fly the airplane.
And it's very difficult to fly the airplane.
We did make an exception once, about 15 years ago.
We took a look at his credentials and we thought, okay, you know what?
We're going to give this gentleman a chance.
And it was impressive how well he could control the airplane.
His name happened to be Neil Armstrong.
So we've told other people, if you’ve walked on the moon,
we’ll probably let you come fly our airplane.
But until then, you know, we're just going to
take you for a ride when we take you flying.