The First Flight: How Wilbur and Orville Wright Flew at Kitty Hawk

Short answer

• The first powered airplane flight took place on December 17, 1903, at Kill Devil Hills near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Orville Wright flew first: 12 seconds, 120 feet, starting at 10:35 a.m.
• The brothers alternated as pilot and flew four times that morning. Wilbur's fourth flight was the longest: 852 feet in 59 seconds.
• The machine, now called the Wright Flyer or Flyer I, had a wingspan of 40 feet 4 inches, weighed 605 pounds empty, and was powered by a 12-horsepower gasoline engine driving two propellers.
• A coin toss decided who tried first. Wilbur won the toss and made a failed attempt on December 14; three days later it was Orville's turn, and he made history.
• Their breakthrough was control, not power: a three-axis control system (wing-warping for roll, an elevator for pitch, a rudder for yaw) that they patented in 1906.
• Five men from the local lifesaving station watched the flights, and one of them, John T. Daniels, took the famous photograph of the first liftoff.
• Two years later, at Huffman Prairie near Dayton, Ohio, the improved Wright Flyer III flew 24 miles in 39 minutes, which the Smithsonian calls the first practical airplane.

On the morning of December 17, 1903, on the sand flats below the Kill Devil Hills near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, a fabric-covered biplane with a 12-horsepower engine lifted off a wooden launching rail and flew for 12 seconds. Orville Wright was lying at the controls; his brother Wilbur ran alongside steadying a wingtip. The flight covered 120 feet, less than the wingspan of a modern jumbo jet, but it was the first time in history that a powered, heavier-than-air machine had taken off, flown under control, and landed at a point at least as high as its starting point, with a pilot aboard. By the end of that morning the brothers had flown four times, and the last flight stayed up for 59 seconds and covered 852 feet. The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, which now preserves the machine, describes it as the first powered, heavier-than-air aircraft to achieve controlled, sustained flight with a pilot aboard. This article tells the story of that day, the machine that made it possible, the three years of experiments that led to it, and what happened next.

The Morning of December 17, 1903

The day began with the brothers hanging out a signal to the crew of the Kill Devil Hills Life-Saving Station, about a mile away, that they intended to try flying. The weather was bitter: a headwind of about 27 miles per hour and temperatures near freezing. At 10:35 a.m., with the engine warmed up and the Flyer resting on a small dolly on its 60-foot launching rail, Orville climbed aboard, lay prone on the lower wing in the hip cradle that worked the wing-warping control, and released the restraining wire.

The machine accelerated down the rail, lifted into the air about 40 feet along it, and flew, pitching up and down as Orville worked the sensitive elevator, before settling onto the sand 120 feet from the start. It had been airborne 12 seconds. Because of the strong headwind, its speed over the ground was only about 6.8 miles per hour, though its speed through the air was around 30 miles per hour. The brothers shook hands, swapped roles, and kept going. Each made two flights:

Flight	Pilot	Time	Distance
1	Orville Wright	12 seconds	120 feet
2	Wilbur Wright	12 seconds	175 feet
3	Orville Wright	15 seconds	200 feet
4	Wilbur Wright	59 seconds	852 feet

The fourth flight ended with a hard landing that cracked the front elevator supports. It did not matter much, because minutes later, as the brothers and the lifesaving crew were carrying the machine back and discussing the flight, a gust of wind caught the Flyer, rolled it over repeatedly, and wrecked it. The 1903 Flyer never flew again. That afternoon Orville sent a telegram to their father in Dayton, Ohio, beginning with the word “Success,” and the brothers packed the machine for shipment home.

The Machine: Flyer I by the Numbers

The aircraft that flew that morning, usually called the Wright Flyer, Flyer I, or the 1903 Flyer, was built in the back of the brothers’ bicycle shop in Dayton during the fall of 1903. Its key figures, as recorded by the Smithsonian and the National Park Service, are these:

• Wingspan: 40 feet 4 inches (12.3 meters)
• Length: 21 feet 1 inch (6.43 meters)
• Height: 9 feet 4 inches (2.8 meters)
• Weight: 605 pounds (274 kg) empty; about 750 pounds with the pilot
• Engine: one inline four-cylinder gasoline engine, water-cooled, weighing 170 pounds and producing 12 horsepower
• Propellers: two, 8 feet 6 inches in diameter, turning in opposite directions behind the wings

Everything about the machine was purpose-built and lightweight. The frame was spruce and ash covered with uncoated muslin. There were no wheels: the Flyer took off from a rail because the soft sand made a wheeled takeoff impractical, and it landed on wooden skids. The engine was a one-off, built in about six weeks by the brothers’ mechanic, Charlie Taylor, with an aluminum crankcase to save weight. Because no automobile manufacturer could supply an engine light and powerful enough, Taylor machined one to the Wrights’ design. The propellers were equally original. Using data from their own wind tunnel tests, the brothers treated each propeller blade as a rotating wing and carved propellers that were remarkably efficient for their time, converting about two-thirds or more of the engine’s power into thrust by later analyses of their design method. The pilot lay on his stomach on the lower wing, working the elevator with a lever in his left hand and steering with his body: shifting his hips in the cradle warped the wings and moved the rudder together, a control arrangement they refined the following years.

Why Kitty Hawk? Wind, Sand, and Privacy

Kitty Hawk was not an accident of geography. In 1900, looking for a test site, Wilbur wrote to the United States Weather Bureau asking for data on wind conditions at possible locations. The bureau’s chief, Willis Moore, sent statistics for stations around the country, and the brothers wrote directly to the weather observer at Kitty Hawk, Joseph Dosher, who replied with details of the steady winds on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. The aviation pioneer Octave Chanute, with whom Wilbur corresponded, had likewise suggested the mid-Atlantic coast for its breezes and soft landing surfaces. Kitty Hawk offered everything the experiments needed:

• Steady, strong winds off the ocean, which made glider testing possible and helped a marginally powered machine get airborne.
• Soft sand on the flats and dunes of Kill Devil Hills, which forgave the many hard landings of the glider years.
• Open, empty ground, including the great sand dune the locals called Big Kill Devil Hill, for gliding practice.
• Privacy. The remote village had no reporters and few visitors, so the brothers could fail in peace and keep their control system secret while their patent was prepared.

The brothers made their first trip in the fall of 1900 and returned each year through 1903, living in a tent camp and then in wooden camp buildings beside the dunes.

The Road to Kitty Hawk: Gliders and a Wind Tunnel

The flight of 1903 was the end of a four-year research program, and the shape of that program explains why two bicycle makers succeeded where better-funded rivals failed.

The brothers began in 1899, reading everything the Smithsonian could send them and building a small biplane kite to test their central idea: controlling an aircraft in roll by twisting, or warping, the wings. In 1900 they tested a man-carrying glider at Kitty Hawk, flying it mostly as a kite and making a few free glides. Their larger 1901 glider was a disappointment: it produced only about a third of the lift that the standard published data, drawn from the German pioneer Otto Lilienthal’s tables, had predicted. Rather than blame their machine, the Wrights suspected the data.

So in the fall of 1901 they built a small wind tunnel in their bicycle shop and tested some 200 miniature wing shapes, measuring lift and drag with balances of their own design. The results showed that the accepted pressure coefficient used with Lilienthal’s tables was badly wrong, and gave the brothers the most accurate aerodynamic data in the world at that time. The 1902 glider, designed from that data, was a different machine: it had a wingspan of 32 feet and, after they replaced its fixed rear rudders with a movable rudder linked to the wing-warping, it could be controlled around all three axes of motion. In the fall of 1902 the brothers made nearly 1,000 gliding flights at Kitty Hawk, learning to fly as methodically as they had learned to measure. By then the powered machine was an engineering exercise: add an engine and propellers, designed with the same wind tunnel data, to a glider they already knew how to control.

Five Witnesses and One Photograph

For an event that changed the world, the first flight had a tiny audience. Only five men besides the brothers were present: three surfmen from the Kill Devil Hills Life-Saving Station, John T. Daniels, Will Dough, and Adam Etheridge, along with W. C. Brinkley, a lumber buyer from nearby Manteo, and Johnny Moore, a local teenager who helped around the camp. Their presence mattered later. When skeptics doubted the Wrights’ claims, the brothers had named, independent witnesses to the day.

Daniels plays a second part in the story. Before the first flight, Orville set up his camera on a tripod, aimed it at the end of the launching rail, and showed Daniels how to squeeze the shutter bulb when the machine left the ground. Daniels, who later said he was so excited he nearly forgot, squeezed at the right moment. The resulting glass negative, showing the Flyer just airborne with Wilbur running beside it, became one of the most famous photographs in history and the visual proof of the flight. Daniels, who had never used a camera before, had taken, on his first attempt, the defining image of the twentieth century’s first great invention.

Control, Not Power: The Real Invention

It is tempting to think the Wrights won the race to fly because they built a better engine. They did not: their 12-horsepower motor was crude. Samuel Langley, secretary of the Smithsonian, had a far more powerful engine and a large government-backed budget, and his Aerodrome had plunged into the Potomac River twice that fall, most recently on December 8, nine days before Kitty Hawk. What the Wrights had, and nobody else did, was a working system of three-axis control:

• Roll: warping the wings, twisting them to raise one side and lower the other, worked by the pilot’s hip cradle.
• Pitch: a forward elevator (the small wing at the front) to raise or lower the nose.
• Yaw: a rear rudder, at first linked to the warping, to keep the nose pointed correctly in a turn.

That system, not the airplane as a whole, was the heart of their patent. They filed the application in March 1903, months before the first flight, and on May 22, 1906, they received United States Patent 821,393 for a “Flying Machine” whose claims covered their method of controlling an aircraft in the air. Modern airplanes still control the same three axes, using ailerons instead of wing-warping for roll. In the Smithsonian’s judgment, it was the invention of three-axis control that made fixed-wing powered flight practical, and it is why the brothers, and not a better-funded rival, are credited with the airplane.

Did Anyone Fly First? The Rival Claims

No account of Kitty Hawk is complete without the claims that someone else flew earlier. Historians have examined several, and an honest summary is this: powered hops and disputed attempts happened, but none is documented to the standard of December 17, 1903, with dated records, named witnesses, and a photograph.

• Clément Ader (France, 1890). Ader’s steam-powered Éole lifted briefly from level ground and flew about 50 meters, but it was uncontrolled and could not sustain flight. It is generally described as a powered hop, not a flight in the controlled sense.
• Gustave Whitehead (United States, 1901). Whitehead, a German-born mechanic in Connecticut, is claimed to have flown a powered machine near Bridgeport in August 1901, based mainly on a newspaper report of the time. The claim has had periods of official enthusiasm, including a 2013 editorial endorsement by the editor of a major aviation reference annual and a Connecticut state law honoring Whitehead. Mainstream aviation historians, and the Smithsonian, have examined the surviving evidence and found it unconvincing: there is no photograph of the machine in flight, the contemporary reporting is thin and partly contradictory, and later reconstructions rest on inference. The Smithsonian’s stated position is that the 1903 Wright Flyer is the first powered, heavier-than-air machine to achieve controlled, sustained flight with a pilot aboard.
• Richard Pearse (New Zealand, 1903). Pearse built and tested a powered machine in 1903, and some accounts date a short, poorly documented hop to that year. Pearse himself was modest about it, and the evidence rests on much later recollections.
• Alberto Santos-Dumont (France, 1906). Santos-Dumont’s 14-bis flights in Paris in the fall of 1906 were public, officially observed, and genuinely impressive. They were also nearly three years after Kitty Hawk, though they are sometimes cited in Europe because the Wrights’ 1903 flights were made with a launching rail into a strong headwind, in private, while Santos-Dumont took off on wheels before a crowd.

The distinction historians draw is between getting off the ground and flying: the Wrights’ 1903 flights were powered, sustained, and, crucially, controlled, and their 1905 machine could turn, circle, and land where it chose. On the documentary record, the priority belongs to Kitty Hawk.

After Kitty Hawk: The Practical Airplane of 1905

Flying for 59 seconds proved an airplane was possible; it did not yet make one useful. The brothers spent the next two seasons at Huffman Prairie, an 85-acre cow pasture outside Dayton lent to them by a local banker, refining the design in public view of almost no one.

In 1904, with the Flyer II, they taught themselves real maneuvering: on September 20, 1904, Wilbur flew the first complete circle ever made by a powered airplane, and by year’s end they had made 105 flights and flown several of more than five minutes. The 1905 Flyer III, after a serious crash in July led them to enlarge the control surfaces and give the rudder its own separate control, became something new. Between late September and October 5, 1905, the brothers made a series of long flights at Huffman Prairie. On October 5, Wilbur circled the field 30 times in 39 minutes, covering about 24 miles, and landed only when the fuel ran out. The Smithsonian calls the 1905 Flyer III the first practical airplane: it could take off, maneuver under full control, stay up as long as its fuel lasted, and land undamaged where it started.

Satisfied, the brothers stopped flying for two and a half years while they patented their invention and negotiated with buyers, eventually demonstrating in France and to the United States Army in 1908 to worldwide acclaim. The 1903 Flyer itself came home to the Smithsonian: after a long loan to the Science Museum in London during a dispute over credit, it was donated to the Smithsonian and placed on display on December 17, 1948, the 45th anniversary of the flights, where it remains the centerpiece of the National Air and Space Museum.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who flew first, Wilbur or Orville?

Orville made the first flight, but only because of the calendar. The brothers tossed a coin for the first attempt at the powered Flyer; Wilbur won and tried on December 14, 1903, but he over-rotated on takeoff, stalled, and damaged the machine slightly. By the time repairs were finished, on December 17, it was Orville’s turn in their alternation, and he made the first successful flight at 10:35 a.m.

How far and how long was the first flight?

Twelve seconds and 120 feet (about 37 meters). That sounds trivial, and in distance it is: the Flyer traveled less than the length of a modern airliner. What matters is what the flight proved, that a machine carrying a man could take off under its own power, stay in controlled flight, and land safely. The fourth flight that morning, 852 feet in 59 seconds, showed it was no fluke.

Why is Kitty Hawk famous if the brothers were from Ohio?

The Wrights were Dayton, Ohio, bicycle makers, and they did their later flying in Ohio. Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, was chosen purely as a laboratory: Weather Bureau wind statistics pointed them to the Outer Banks for its steady winds, soft sand, and privacy. North Carolina remembers the flight; Ohio remembers the invention, which is why both states claim the brothers on license plates and in museums.

How fast did the first airplane fly?

Slowly. The Flyer’s airspeed on the first flight was about 30 miles per hour, but it was flying into a headwind of about 27 miles per hour, so it moved over the ground at only about 6.8 miles per hour, barely faster than a jogging man. The machine’s top speed was around 30 miles per hour.

Where is the original Wright Flyer today?

In the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., where it has been displayed since December 17, 1948. The 1905 Flyer III, the first practical airplane, is preserved separately at Carillon Historical Park in Dayton, Ohio.

Sources & references

• Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (airandspace.si.edu), "The Wright Brothers Made History at Kitty Hawk" and related collection material on the 1903 Wright Flyer: the December 17, 1903 flights (first flight 12 seconds and 120 feet at 10:35 a.m.; longest flight 852 feet in 59 seconds), the museum's characterization of the Flyer as the first powered, heavier-than-air machine to achieve controlled, sustained flight with a pilot aboard, and the Smithsonian's position on rival first-flight claims.
• Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, "Researching the Wright Way": the September 20, 1904 first circle, and the 1905 Flyer III flight of October 5, 1905 (Wilbur circling Huffman Prairie for about 24 miles in 39 minutes) as the basis for calling the Flyer III the first practical airplane.
• National Park Service (nps.gov), "The Wright Flyer" and Wright Brothers National Memorial material: Flyer specifications (wingspan 40 feet 4 inches, length 21 feet 1 inch, height 9 feet 4 inches, empty weight 605 pounds, 12-horsepower engine, propellers 8 feet 6 inches), the launch rail, and the December 17, 1903 takeoff at 10:35 a.m.
• German Patent and Trade Mark Office (DPMA), milestone profile of the Wright brothers: the three-axis control system and United States Patent 821,393, filed March 23, 1903, and granted May 22, 1906.
• Library of Congress, Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright (including the brothers' diaries, correspondence, and the December 17, 1903 telegram), and the John T. Daniels photograph of the first flight, Prints and Photographs Division.
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Wright brothers" (biographical and technical background, the glider experiments of 1900 to 1902, and the wind tunnel work).