Wilbur made his first flight at Pau on February 3 and from that day on remained a sensation. As said one headline, all Pau was “AGOG.”
Virtually every day but Sunday a steady stream of elegant carriages and automobiles headed out to the flying field to see the doors of the huge red “aerodock” swing wide and the four-year-old Flyer come rolling out, showing signs of much wear and tear, the canvas soiled and torn, patched and tattooed with tin tacks. Wilbur would examine it up and down with his usual care, oil can in hand, pockets bulging with twine, a screwdriver, a wrench, touching a wire here, a bolt there, and never hurrying. Then, with all to his liking, off he would go, “right up into the air, turning, wheeling up and down, graceful as an albatross, showing the perfect command of the aviator.” For a second or two, the plane would seem to hang motionless against the high white line of the snowcapped Pyrénées, “absolutely a scene of beauty quite impossible to describe.”
One of the few problems to contend with was the ground filled with bumps, some the size of a bowler hat, that made takeoffs difficult. Someone suggested that with a bit of spade work the ground could be leveled. It was just what Wilbur and Orville had done preparing for their first test flights at Huffman Prairie, but Wilbur by now felt he could dispense with that. “If we have to alter the face of the earth before we can fly,” he replied, “we may as well throw up the proposition.” Such was the way of the man, observed a writer who was present. “He never sought to escape by the easy way round.”
Most of Wilbur’s time was devoted to training the Comte de Lambert and another of the French aviators he was expected to teach, Paul Tissandier. Like de Lambert, Tissandier was a wealthy aristocrat who had been an automobile racer before taking up aviation. The third student was a French army officer, Captain Paul N. Lucas-Girardville. Of the three, de Lambert was the best pilot and Wilbur’s favorite.
In none of his flights at Pont-Long was Wilbur attempting to set a record, and so other passengers, too, went aloft seated beside him, as many as a dozen altogether, including Katharine, who went up before a large crowd on February 15, just as night was coming on. It was her first time in the air.
A spell of cold weather had set in. (“Southern sunny France is a delusion and a snare!” she had told her father.) But all that was forgotten when Wilbur at long last invited her to go with him.
She was most happily surprised by how smoothly they sailed along and how easily she could recognize faces below. She thought they were flying at about 30 feet, but found out later it was 60 feet, and they were moving at 42 miles per hour. Yet she had a feeling of complete tranquillity and forgot completely about the cold. The flight lasted seven minutes. To show her the ease with which he could maneuver the machine, Wilbur made several sharp turns, but again she experienced no ill effects and never showed the least sign of fear.
Asked later if she had felt like a bird when flying with her brother, Katharine responded, “I don’t know exactly how a bird feels. Birds sing, I suppose, because they are happy. I sang, I know, and I was very happy indeed. But like the birds, I sang best after the flight was over.”
By now Wilbur was making flights with passengers five or six times a day. Who got to go was entirely up to him, and while it was assumed by many that he was charging a fee for so rare a privilege, and many were prepared to pay, and pay handsomely, he charged nothing, which made a great impression.
When a wealthy American from Philadelphia was told by Lord Northcliffe that only Wilbur decided who went with him, the man replied, “Oh, I dare say that can be arranged.”
“I would like to be around when you do the arranging, just to see how it’s done,” Northcliffe replied. The man did not get his ride.
Northcliffe would later say he never knew more unaffected people than Wilbur, Orville, and Katharine Wright, and that he did not think the excitement over them and the intense interest produced by their extraordinary feats had any effect on them whatsoever.