Ohio and North Carolina often get into a dispute about who can “claim” the Wright Brothers. The former was where the two lived and conducted most of their research, but the latter was where they actually took to the air for the first time. The debate rages on, with shots fired in forms from commemorative coins to license plates.

But the place where the Wright Brothers really fathered the American aviation age was right here in the DC area, where they taught the first military pilots to fly, proved to the American public that their machine was real, and took to the air at what is now the oldest airport in the world.

The Wright Brothers made their first flight on that famous beach in Kitty Hawk, NC, in December 1903. They made numerous other flights in 1904, gaining confidence with each trial. But for years, the Wrights’ experiments were discredited by the aviation experts of the day. They considered the brothers’ results too good to be true, and the Wrights’ reluctance to show people their airplane, fearing patent theft, certainly didn’t help convince anyone that they were anything more than con artists. The overblown claims of newspapers after their first flight - that they could fly “three miles at a time”^[1] at “express train velocities”^[2] - may have caused the Wrights’ actual achievements to seem disappointing in comparison. For years, when they would invite the press to see flights of their airplane, nobody came. Even an article in 1906, which acknowledged the importance of their discoveries with regards to pilot control, still referred to the mystery of flight as something that would be solved in the future.^[3]

Residents of the District were quite familiar with inventors claiming to have solved the mystery of flight. Two months before the Wrights’ successful flight, they had seen the Smithsonian-backed Langley Aerodrome,^[4] a project that had the respect of the aeronautical community and $50,000 of government funding^[5] behind it, plunge into the Potomac within seconds. Understandably, people were considerably more skeptical of the claims of two unknown bicycle makers from Dayton.

However, this all began to change in late 1907. When the French and German governments began to show interest in the Wrights’ plane, the U.S. government finally decided to make its move. The Wrights had reached out to the government two years before, but they had been rejected. After the Wrights’ successful flights in France in 1908, the Department of War signed the Wrights for a contract, and commissioned the first army airplane, alternately called Signal Corps No. 1 and the Wright Military Flyer.

The Wrights would prove their machine’s qualifications at Fort Myer, a military base in Arlington County, VA. They met or exceeded all of the Army’s specifications, including flying at 40 miles per hour, carrying a combined passenger weight of 350 pounds, maneuvering in any direction in the air, landing without damage, and flying for at least an hour non-stop, which was a world record at the time.^[6]

Video of a test at Ft. Myer, on July 27, 1909. Orville Wright is the pilot and Lt. Frank Lahm is the passenger. President Taft, his wife, and a crowd of others are in attendance.

The Wright brothers, however, hated Ft. Myer. The field was much too small to make any kind of significant maneuver, with only enough space to fly straight for at most a few hundred yards before being in danger of hitting the surrounding buildings and tall trees.^[7] The crowds that the Wrights could never draw before flocked to Ft. Myer in the thousands; President Taft became a frequent spectator, and the flight ground became a popular picnic site for the upper crust. Needless to say, the Wright brothers were not happy about this further obstruction. Ft. Myer’s commander was not a big fan of the Wright brothers, either; the fort’s primary purpose was as a cavalry base, and the noise from the airplane spooked the horses.

In light of this, the Signal Corps sent Lt. Frank Lahm to search for a new, more suitable site through hot-air balloon flights (as was then the state of the art in aerial reconnaissance).^[8]

The Army selected a 160-acre field in College Park, close to the Maryland Agricultural College,^[9] as the site for further testing, leasing it from a farmer on August 25, 1909. College Park was chosen for its proximity to the railroad tracks, making it easy to transport necessary material and personnel to the site, as well as the relative distance from more urban Washington, D.C., making for fewer obstructions and (they hoped) fewer spectators. Even moving to College Park, however, did not fully dissuade the crowds of flight-watchers, with visitors showing up despite the eight-mile rail journey to the airfield.

The final part of the Wrights’ contract specified that they had to train two Army men to fly their machine. Lieutenants Lahm and Benjamin D. Foulois were chosen to be the first officers to be trained by Wright, but due to Foulois’ selection for the International Congress of Aeronautics in France, he was replaced by Lt. Frederic E. Humphreys of the Corps of Engineers.^[10]

Wilbur Wright was to train the pilots; Orville was in Berlin at the time, demonstrating their Flyer to the German government. Wilbur first took to the air with his students on October 8, 1909, and over the course of four weeks, taught them to maneuver and land the plane, as well as how to coast to the ground with a dead engine. On October 26, Humphreys and Lahm flew solo for the first time. While at College Park, Wilbur also repeated several of Orville’s experiments from Berlin, as well as determining that the machine could lift itself from the starting rail under its own power, which it did for the first time; previously, they used a catapult-like device with a heavy weight to provide enough momentum for the Flyer to start.^[11]

Once Wilbur had finished training Lahm and Humphreys, he gave the returning Foulois a total of 54 minutes of flight time, before Lahm and Humphreys crashed the plane on November 5, ending military flights for several months. Lahm and Humphreys, however, had to return to their divisions, leaving the undertrained Foulois the only military pilot.^[12]

After a year and a half of inactivity, during which time Foulois had to teach himself to fly, the Army opened a flight school at College Park in 1911, where four army officers and 15 engineers convened to learn to operate four planes (two Wright B models, two Curtiss models, and one Burgess-Wright).^[13] Over the next two years, hangars were built on the current site of the College Park Metro, although the modern hangars stand about a half-mile away, and more land was purchased to expand the airfield to 200 acres.^[14]

However, College Park’s snowy winters proved to be a problem for flying during colder months, and so the school would migrate south to Ft. Sam Houston in San Antonio, TX until the weather improved back in College Park. This was a very cumbersome and inconvenient process, and so eventually, in 1912, the flight school moved permanently to California.

Even when the military flight school moved away, however, College Park remained an active airport, hosting further aviation experiments, serving as a base for some government aircraft, and opening to the public for flights of private planes. The College Park airport was the site of a host of other “firsts,” including the first woman in America to fly in a plane (1909),^[15] the first machine gun fired from an airplane (1912),^[16] the departure of the first airmail flight (1918),^[17] the first controlled helicopter flight (1924),^[18] and the first blind landing using only instruments (1931).^[19] The airport is still active today, making it the oldest continuously operational airport in the world, and a few times a day, airplanes rise from the same ground on which America’s first pilots learned to fly over a hundred years ago.

More Information

This article wouldn’t have been possible without the invaluable research assistance of Ameena Mohammad and Scott Allen of the College Park Aviation Museum. Even though the airport is still active, there is a fairly sizable Smithsonian-affiliated museum on its grounds, with exhibits about the history of the airport and aviation. It’s definitely worth a visit, especially given that the museum features an animatronic Wilbur Wright, who polishes a propeller at you while he gives you a friendly rundown of the airport’s early history. 

More on the Wright brothers’ struggle for recognition and their tour of Europe: http://generalaviationnews.com/2011/05/09/fliers-or-liars/