Once the test flights got under way in June, it became clear the improvements were working. Moreover, the two pilots were “rusty” no longer.
In one important close call on September 28, as Orville would recount, he was circling the great honey locust tree when the machine suddenly began to turn up one wing and stall. “The operator, not relishing the idea of landing in a thorn tree, attempted to reach the ground.” The left wing struck the tree at a height of 10 or 12 feet and carried away several branches, but by putting the plane into a brief dive Orville was able to nose the plane upward again, and the flight, which had already covered 6 miles, continued on to the starting point. The lesson learned was another step forward—the brief dive had restored the speed needed to increase the lift and thereby straighten the effect of the warp.
Wilbur by then had flown 11 miles on a single run, Orville, 12 miles, then 15. To both of them, this, their Flyer III, with its “improvements,” was as big an advance as Flyer I had proven to be at Kitty Hawk.
It was at Huffman Prairie that summer and fall of 1905 that the brothers, by experiment and change, truly learned to fly. Then, also, at last, with a plane they could rely on, they could permit themselves enjoyment in what they had achieved. They could take pleasure in the very experience of traveling through the air in a motor-powered machine as no one had. And each would try as best he could to put the experience in words.
“When you know, after the first few minutes, that the whole mechanism is working perfectly,” Wilbur was to say, “the sensation is so keenly delightful as to be almost beyond description. Nobody who has not experienced it for himself can realize it. It is a realization of a dream so many persons have had of floating in the air. More than anything else the sensation is one of perfect peace, mingled with the excitement that strains every nerve to the utmost, if you can conceive of such a combination.”
Once into the air Orville would write, the ground was “a perfect blur,” but as the plane rose higher the objects below became clearer.
At a height of one hundred feet you feel hardly any motion at all, except for the wind which strikes your face. If you did not take the precaution to fasten your hat before starting, you have probably lost it by this time.
The operator moves a lever: the right wing rises, and the machine swings about to the left. You make a very short turn yet you do not feel the sensation of being thrown from your seat, so often experienced in automobile and railway travel. You find yourself facing toward the point from which you started. The objects on the ground now seem to be moving at much higher speed, though you perceive no change in the pressure of the wind on your face. You know then that you are traveling with the wind.
When you near the starting-point, the operator stops the motor while still high in the air. The machine coasts down at an oblique angle to the ground, and after sliding fifty or a hundred feet comes to rest. Although the machine often lands when traveling at a speed of a mile a minute, you feel no shock whatever, and cannot, in fact, tell the exact moment at which it first touched the ground.
The motor close beside you kept up an almost deafening roar during the whole flight, yet in your excitement, you did not notice it till it stopped!
By now the brothers were openly encouraging family and friends to ride out and see the show. Bishop Wright and Katharine, Lorin and his wife and children, and some seventeen friends and neighbors came by trolley or automobile, and many more than once.
Next-door neighbors John Feight and his son George were among them. Torrence Huffman, a doubter no longer, brought along three of his children. Charles Webbert came to watch, as did Frank Hale, the grocer, and druggist W. C. Fouts, whose respective establishments were close by the bicycle shop on West Third Street; and Frank Hamberger, the hardware dealer whose inventory Wilbur and Orville had helped save at the time of the 1898 flood.
On the afternoon of October 5, 1905, before more than a dozen witnesses, Wilbur circled the pasture 29 times, landing only when his gas ran out.
“I saw Wilbur fly twenty-four miles in thirty-eight minutes and four seconds [in] one flight,” wrote the Bishop. In fact, this one flight was by far the longest yet, longer than all the 160 flights of the three previous years combined.
By the time the experiments ended, the brothers had made 105 “starts” at Huffman Prairie and thought it time now to put their creation, Flyer III, on the market.
By this point, too, the Dayton press had at last awakened. The Wrights, reported the Daily News, were making sensational flights every day as local witnesses were happy to attest. W. C. Fouts, the druggist, was quoted saying: