The Secret Of Flight: The History Of Early Flight

On December 17, 1903, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, a bicycle mechanic from Dayton, Ohio flew a powered aircraft for twelve seconds and changed the world. Alexander Lippisch was nine years old. By the time he made this film, he had spent fifty years building on what that moment started. Episode 3 of The Secret of Flight — The History Of Early Flight — is the most personal episode in the series. Dr. Lippisch traces the long, dangerous, frequently fatal road that led to the Wright Brothers' success: the German glider pioneer Otto Lilienthal, who made over 2,000 flights and died in 1896 when a gust of wind stalled his glider and sent him into the ground; Octave Chanute, the French-American engineer who systematically studied every glider experiment that came before and shared everything he learned freely with anyone who asked, including the Wright Brothers; Samuel Langley, the Smithsonian Institution's chief scientist, whose powered aircraft crashed twice into the Potomac River in the weeks before Kitty Hawk — a failure that became a bitter institutional embarrassment; and finally Wilbur and Orville themselves, two men with no university education and no government funding who solved in four years a problem that had defeated everyone else. What makes Lippisch uniquely qualified to tell this story is that he isn't working from books. He was a young man in Germany when these events unfolded, following them with the obsessive interest of someone who had already decided that flight was his life's work. After World War I, when Germany was forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles from building powered aircraft, Lippisch turned to gliders — the same technology Lilienthal had pioneered — and spent years mastering the aerodynamics that the early pioneers had discovered through intuition and trial and error. He understood their work from the inside. The history of early flight is often told as a triumphant march toward Kitty Hawk. Lippisch tells it as something more complicated — a story of men who understood that what they were attempting could kill them, and attempted it anyway, because the problem was too interesting to leave unsolved.