Even so the license-plate from NC reads "first in flight", the first
flight was in Germany by Otto Lilienthal and not the Wright Brothers.
They were the first with an engine but not the first to fly.

Michael


On Tue, 21 May 2002 13:18:59 -0700, Shawn Gordon <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

>so I guess we have Lindberg and the Wright Brothers to thank for all this
>global warming.
>
>At 12:57 PM 5/21/2002, Wirt Atmar wrote:
>>Today is the 75th anniversary of Lindberg's arrival in Paris. Perhaps more
>>amazing is that he accomplished this just 24 years after the Wright
Brothers'
>>first flight.
>>
>>Although the Spirit of St. Louis looks like a modern airplane, that
>>appearance is to a great degree deceiving. The Spirit was a transitional
>>evolutionary form, almost a perfect geometric mean between the Wright
Flyer
>>and a Concorde. The Spirit of St. Louis was covered in the same kind of
>>stretched linen fabric as the kite-emulating planes that Wilbur and
Orville
>>flew. The Spirit appears metallic only because of the doping that Ryan
>>Aircraft used was an aluminum-based pigment.
>>
>>The true evolutionary novelty that allowed the Spirit the power and
>>reliability to fly the Atlantic was the air-cooled Wright radial engine.
It
>>was simple enough to be extremely reliable (it's parts count was among the
>>lowest ever built), but also had the highest power-to-weight ratio of any
>>engine yet built at the time.
>>
>>Although it's been 75 years since Lindberg's flight -- and it will be a
>>hundred years next year since the first flight -- it's almost unimaginable
to
>>consider that only 66 years elapsed between Kitty Hawk and the Sea of
>>Tranquility, with the most important short stopover being Le Bourget, all
>>occurring well within the lifetime of an individual human being. We were
able
>>to realize in the span of only slightly more than a half century
humanity's
>>most persistent dream, one that is undoubtedly as old as humanity itself.
>>
>>Wirt Atmar
>>
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>
>
>Regards,
>
>Shawn Gordon
>President
>theKompany.com
>www.thekompany.com
>949-713-3276
>
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