A Cue From Kitty Hawk: What the Wright Brothers Teach Us About Decarbonizing Flight
The seeds of modern aviation didn’t merely sprout from two brothers’ dream of flight. They broke into the sunlight through the rigor of the scientific process.
I’ve heard that the Wright brothers tested hundreds of wing designs during their efforts to build and demonstrate the first fully functional airplane. Many of those wooden wings never took off. But every experiment — whether airborne or not — taught the American inventors something valuable.
Orville and Wilbur Wright carried insights back to their lab, where they polished their understanding of the dynamics of lift. They gathered detailed data, revised their assumptions, and improved their designs. It was rigorous applied science that earned extraordinary results.
