JS: Could you explain what your aims are in terms of the 2003 celebration?
KH: Our main goal is to recreate authentically the 1903 Flier just the way it was in 1903 and train pilots on it to be able to fly it and put it in the wind tunnel, get technical data and research, to know exactly how they built it and what it was capable of doing. And then, actually going to Kitty Hawk and flying the airplane. We're going to put on a demonstration on December 17th. (2003)
JS: What happens to it after that?
KH: The airplane that we'll be flying on December 17th will go to the Henry Ford museum in Dearborn.
JS: You told me in the past how little was actually known about the Wright Brother's methods; what kind of journey has that been for you?
KH: It's been very long, very rewarding and in some ways very frustrating because they left us a pretty good paper trail. But they were also the very first businessmen who understood the necessity to prevent industrial spying or espionage. So as a result of their process..they became very secretive. They filed for a patent and they had to protect that even after the patent was applied for.
JS: You've pieced it together from various documents. (Does that mean) there's no one file on what they did; it's scattered?
KH: It's scattered everywhere. We're acquiring letters from Europe, from the collection that they left to Wright State, the collection they left to the Library of Congress and then most importantly, the Wright family has been helping us with letters that they have as well as what they know of the story.
JS: What about the story? We all read in it in our childhood history books, we all have a general impression of what these two guys did, but what have you learned that surprises you today in putting together the puzzle?
KH: Well, we've basically uncovered the world's greatest detective story. They intended to tell this story; they left us a lot of documents for that purpose. They left us a lot of technical information. The problem was that Wilbur was a writer, not Orville. And Wilbur died at an early age, in 1912.
So Orville spent the rest of his life trying..to tell this story..or find someone who would do it, and he never found anyone that he was happy with that would tell it effectively. He was very, very fussy about being authentic and wanted it to be told correctly. He had one autobiographer, Fred Kelly, that he trusted and Kelly wrote a very good book but Orville was even unhappy in many terms about that book.
JS: In the technical details, is the airplane as amazing as you'd expect; are you finding things that make you say 'how in the world did they come up with that?'
KH: Well, anytime we have original artifacts to measure or look at or document we come away shaking our heads because the ingenuity of the process that they went through in this whole plan..and it was a very systematic plan..is just amazing in that it set the precedent of the way we build airplanes today. They set about systematically to discover the secrets of flight and they did it. And they had some very discouraging times but they turned their failures into their biggest successes. It's very rewarding to uncover these pieces; we've been doing it long enough now that when we find something it kinda falls in place.
JS: What's been the biggest surprise?
KH: The timeline that they built things in. We don't know when they slept. They were able to do this in a very short period of time. There was a bit of a race on and they knew that. They thought Langley would be the first to fly because he had the funds and he was supposed to be the aeronautical authority.
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