The brothers were waiting for the wind to settle down. Again the wind would be the deciding factor, the wind would have the final say, no matter that most of the United States Senate and several thousand others were being kept waiting.
Orville got up and walked away toward the shed looking nervous. Then Wilbur walked off a while. Then both returned to sit again and chat with a small group of army officers. “She’s blowing at a 16-mile clip,” Wilbur told an inquiring reporter. “That’s far too stiff for a first flight with a new machine.” He looked windward again and sniffed the air.
“Take her back to the shed,” he said.
“There is always an element of uncertainty in aviation as far as it has advanced,” Wilbur explained to a writer for the Washington Post. “People must remember that this machine has never been flown before, and also that my brother has not been up in the air since his accident last year. They can’t blame me for wanting the first flight to be made under conditions as nearly ideal as possible.”
No one with a keen sense of dramatic effect, wrote the Washington Herald, could have created a better scene to demonstrate the “utter immunity of the two brothers from the fumes of importunity and the intoxication of an august assemblage.”
Uniformed army signalmen gathered “like pallbearers” and wheeled the plane away, and four thousand spectators departed, many expressing opinions, including one senator, who was heard to say of the brothers, “I’m damned if I don’t admire their independence. We don’t mean anything to them, and there are a whole lot of reasons why we shouldn’t.”
That same day, Bishop Wright and brother Reuchlin arrived in Washington, the Bishop having acquired two new suits and two new shirts for the expedition.
Late the afternoon of June 29, Wilbur had “no quarrels” with the weather, and shortly before six o’clock Orville finally took to the air. The crowd, noticeably smaller than three days before, but still numbering several thousand, saw the plane waver, struggling, as it skimmed over the grass for no more than 75 feet, then, at a height of about 15 feet, tilt sharply to the right and its wing touch the ground, at which point Orville cut the engine and the machine came down in a cloud of dust.
A second and third flight were hardly better. Finally, on the fourth try, a flight lasting all of 40 seconds, the plane reached an altitude of 25 feet and took a turn down the field and back. Still it was enough to evoke cheers and automobile horns.
Orville and Wilbur were both in fine spirits now, perfectly confident the machine would prove a success, and that Orville would remain at the controls. He would do no flying at Fort Myer, Wilbur told reporters. That was Orville’s job. But being “big brother,” he would do the “bossing.”
A machine was like a horse, Wilbur said. “If it’s new, you have to get used to it before it will do just as you want it to. You have to learn its peculiarities.” As a result of the day’s test flights, it was discovered that one important “peculiarity” was that the ignition, or “sparker,” was being shaken loose by vibrations, and thus the motor had too little power.
The next two days, while Wilbur, Orville, and Charlie Taylor worked on the engine, the Bishop and Reuchlin went to the Smithsonian to look at “all manner of birds, Ostrich, Emu, Condor, etc.,” as the Bishop recorded in his diary.
Another day, when Orville took off again, the plane climbed only 20 feet and after a distance of 200 feet hit the ground hard enough to smash one skid.
Then, on July 2, at an elevation of 80 to 100 feet and at about the same point over the hangar where the propeller had broken the previous September and Orville’s plane had plunged to the ground, the engine suddenly stopped dead. And though this time he was able to glide “nicely” down, he hit a small thorn tree, ripping open a good-sized portion of the plane’s lower wing fabric. Then the machine fell heavily, breaking both skids. Fortunately, Orville was not hurt.
Again, as the previous September, reporters and some of the spectators rushed to the crash, as did Wilbur, who, seeing a photographer by the wrecked plane, lost his noted self-control, just as he had with the photographer at Le Mans, picked up a stick and threw it at the man, then demanded he turn over the exposed photographic plate, which he did.
It had not been a good day. (Wilbur would later apologize to the photographer who, it turned out, was an official with the War Department.) But the brothers had had more than a little experience with adversity and, as so often before, refused to give up.
The next day, Orville went off to Dayton to prepare a new wing covering and by July 7 was back at Fort Myer, where the work resumed. On July 21, Katharine arrived to join the brothers and that afternoon watched Orville make a short, 10-minute flight at an estimated speed of 44 miles per hour, or faster than Wilbur had ever flown in Europe, as she happily reported to those at home.