Taking a Flyer on a 100-Year_Old Plan

The test pilots said the aircraft was a handful. The nose pitched up and down like a ship in a gale. And the whole thing tended to weave through the sky with a queasy oscillation called a Dutch roll.

Flying low was frightening. The craft would dip and then climb. Landings had to be aborted. "Flying techniques successfully employed on other airplanes were not necessarily appropriate" for this one, the Air Force pilots wrote.

This was no hot new jet. It was a computer simulation of the Wright Brothers' 1903 Kitty Hawk Flyer. And as next year's centennial focuses such fresh research on the Wrights' feat, four teams of experts across the country are pondering anew: How, exactly, did they do it?
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