The Wright stuff
In Dayton, a cadre of volunteers are reengineering history
Soon, the pavement drops from under our feet and my brain struggles to assimilate this sensory barrage. It seems impossible that this scaffold of cables and struts could share the sky with the birds, but we continue climbing. Out of ground effect, the air supports us, and the wings hold steady. I remember to breathe and start to trust the machine. This thing really can fly.
Strange bird
What is this?
First, what it’s not: “We are not a replica,” says Wright “B” Flyer Inc. chief pilot Rich Stepler, sitting in the open-air biplane nicknamed the “White Bird” at the organization’s hangar museum in Miamisburg, Ohio. The all-volunteer, not-for-profit corporation flies aircraft built to resemble the Wright Model B to bring the history of the Wright brothers to life and highlight Dayton’s role in the development of the airplane. “Replica suggests that it would be the same materials built in the same technique. We’re not.”
This airplane retains some of the original design characteristics of the Wright B Flyer, which the Wright Company produced in West Dayton beginning in 1910: open-frame tail, counter-rotating propellers connected by chains to a single engine. But safety standards have changed since the Wright EX Vin Fiz left a trail of parts across America on the first crossing of the United States by airplane. This “B” uses modern materials and construction. Steel and aluminum replace ash and spruce. A 210-horsepower Lycoming YIO-390 stands in for the original Wright Vertical 4, which put out 28 to 42 horsepower. And roll is controlled by ailerons, which quickly eclipsed the Wrights’ pioneering wing warping system.
The Wright “B” team prefers the term lookalike. “A lookalike is an airplane that at 100 yards, you probably couldn’t tell apart from an original. And that’s what we strove to do.”
The enterprise began as a project on nearby Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in the 1970s. The Wright brothers’ original drawings had been destroyed in the Dayton flood of 1913, so the planners took detailed measurements of the modified Model B at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force and used it as the basis for a lookalike. The Brown Bird, as it came to be called, made its first flight in 1982, and operations soon moved to Dayton/Wright Brothers Airport. The organization brought the airplane to airshows and events and offered runway hops to convey what early flyers experienced.
“Some people are, emotionally moved to tears,” Stepler says. “And it’s happy tears. You know, they you get to experience exactly what the Wright brothers felt and saw and, that that for some is an emotional event.”
The group started getting requests for airshow appearances overseas, so they designed a smaller lookalike—the Silver Bird—that could be easily disassembled and trailered in a shipping container. It flew for about 20 hours of its 40-hour flight test phase when a broken weld on the left propeller shaft led to an accident that killed both Wright “B” Flyer Inc. pilots on board in 2011.
After the accident, the team regrouped. They decided to build another lookalike based on the Silver Bird, with some critical design changes. The White Bird first flew in late 2021 and made its first public appearances in 2023. Now the team hopes to begin guest flights in the White Bird.
The Wrights’ system of wing warping controls the aircraft by twisting the wings.
Racing semis
“The airplane has a personality,” says Stepler. “Well, but let me say that a little stronger: The airplane has an attitude.”
He’s talking about the Brown Bird, which flew more than 5,100 guest flights between 1982 and 2022 and which now towers over the White Bird and other memorabilia in the Wright “B” Flyer Inc. hangar museum. Stepler has more than two decades of experience in the Brown Bird and trained the other Wright “B” pilots in its unusual flight characteristics: With no wing dihedral for stability, it requires constant control inputs; its light wing loading of 7 pounds per square foot makes it susceptible to turbulence and a delay from control input to action means the pilot is always anticipating.
The Wright “B” pilots say the White Bird is less squirrely. Strapping into the passenger seat on a cool June morning, I hope so.
Startup has the air of a military operation. When the crew chief signals the area is clear, pilot Hank Griffiths starts the engine, then the clutch engages, and the propellers start turning. When Griffiths is ready to taxi, the crew chief gives the signal, ground crew pull chocks, and we taxi out to Runway 20.
During a 30-year career in the U.S. Air Force, Griffiths was a test pilot for the F–16 and F–35 and director of the F–35 Integrated Test Force. Now he leads a flight test team for the U.S. Air Force’s Afwerx program, for which he’s flown such advanced technology as the Joby S4 eVTOL and Beta Alia electric fixed-wing aircraft. Stepler recruited Griffiths and fellow pilot Jeff Stands from Wright-Patterson for the flight testing of the White Bird.
As Griffiths accelerates down the runway, airspeed comes alive on the Dynon SkyView display. We climb at 55 knots and Griffiths marvels that we’ve reached 200 feet agl by the end of the runway; normal climb is 150 to 200 fpm, but with the cool air and light load we’re seeing about 300 fpm. He turns base to a panoramic view of the trees and houses below. “To actually think about the Wrights when they flew, this was their view,” he says.
We turn downwind to parallel the highway, outpaced by the semi-trucks on I-75.
Helmets, flight suits, digital displays—historical purists would be horrified. But you can’t get this view from a replica. Authenticity is in the rush of air, the unobstructed scenery. I imagine the Wrights’ early passengers making the same trek from incredulity to amazement.
Authenticity is in the rush of air, the unobstructed scenery. I imagine the Wrights’ early passengers making the same trek from incredulity to amazement.Griffiths gives me the controls and invites me to try some gentle turns. The airplane steadily complies. The pilots have warned me the White Bird rides thermals like a glider, but on this still morning it feels stable, solid. Griffiths reminds me to maintain 55 knots—climb at 55, cruise at 55, approach at 55—and I hold constant forward pressure on the stick.
I straighten out, and the tail wags gently as I chase each oscillation. It continues as I make another lap around the pattern before Griffiths takes the controls again. He pulls power back to 2,100 rpm and maintains forward stick pressure to descend at 500 fpm, then makes a power-on landing to keep airflow over the tail.
When the Brown Bird was operating, members who donated to Wright “B” Flyer Inc. could experience hops down the length of the runway in the lookalike.
“Frequently, on Saturdays in particular, the airplane would be started in the morning, and we’d go all day, shutting down only for fuel,” Stepler says. “And we’ve had some days where we put it away at dusk, we just had so many people in line….The whole purpose is to give people the experience associated with early flight—to keep alive the Wright brothers’ dreams. So, we were very happy to be busy.”
The passenger hops were conducted under an exemption allowing the organization to accept donations for flights in the experimental amateur-built aircraft. Wright “B” Flyer Inc. is working to obtain an exemption for the White Bird, but new requests face increased scrutiny since the fatal crash of a Collings Foundation B–17 in 2019. Don Adams, president of Wright “B” Flyer Inc., says the organization continues to receive private donations and support from the National Aviation Heritage Area, but the flights were a critical source of revenue. “We need to get back to revenue flights….That helps sustain us,” he says.
Click on images to expand and view captions.
Spec Sheet
Engineering history
The Wright Company produced the first Model B in 1910 and made its first deliveries to the U.S. Army Signal Corps in 1911. Production continued in Dayton through 1914, with many more produced around the world under license.
“It has a lot of firsts associated with it,” Stepler says. The first production airplane. The first cargo flight. The first commercial aircraft. The first military aircraft. The first radio transmission from an airplane. The first gunfire from an airplane. To Stepler, it’s the pinnacle of Wilbur and Orville Wright’s collective genius. With their attentions turned to business, the brothers never again worked together in the same way to advance the technology of aviation. By the end of the Wright B’s production run, nimble warplanes were preparing for global conflict. The B was obsolete.
Globally, aeronautical development raced forward to the golden age of aviation, the jet age, and beyond. But it all began in Dayton.
“The mission is to maintain the Wright brothers’ history here, and what they accomplished,” says Adams. “By building the flying machine that they did, they virtually changed the world.”
Spirit of innovation
The engine’s still warm and volunteers are flipping through a readout of data from the Dynon. Flight and engine data and readings from sensors on the airplane help the team identify anomalies such as vibration or a cylinder that’s running a little hot.
It may be a design issue or just require an operational change, but the team sits down at the table every Saturday morning to discuss how the airplane is flying. Uneven cooling is the challenge of the day.
Despite the modern technology available to the team, there are still surprises. Jim Papa, who retired as director of engineering and technical management at the Air Force Materiel Command, says they expected a cruise angle of attack of 7 or 8 degrees, but flight testing revealed it’s more like 10 to 12. Interference drag from the struts has a greater impact on lift than anticipated. And Stands, one of four pilots qualified to fly the White Bird, notes that single pilot flight testing with weights accounted for the mass of a second occupant but not the drag.
But, like the bicycle sellers of Dayton more than a century ago, they record and regroup. The design is always evolving.
It takes volunteers of all backgrounds to keep the museum open and the White Bird flying. Most are retired and now dedicate their skills to designing, maintaining, and operating the White Bird and supporting the museum.
“We’ve got pilots, we’ve got crew chiefs, we’ve got people that were in the military,” says Adams. “But we have all kinds of other volunteers, too. We have people who were firefighters, police officers. I was a salesman. And we just have a passion for maintaining this history here that we have. And it’s a labor of love to do this.”
As the pilots sit debriefing after a busy morning of flights, a volunteer stops by on his way out the door.
“It’s fun,” he says. “Especially when you guys are flying. I feel like a crew chief again.”
“This place makes us feel young,” Stands says.
“That’s what I tell prospective volunteers all the time,” says Papa. “People come in and what I tell them is, you come here to, kind of a hobby, volunteer. But you can do things that you used to do when you were a young engineer or young crew chief where you were actually out there kicking the tires and lighting the fires.”
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