One Hundred Years of Altitude

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Outside Magazine June 2002

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One Hundred Years of Altitude
Rick Young—restaurateur, technophile, obsessed basement hobbyist—is about to pilot the first perfect replica of the 1903 Wright flyer, the rickety, wood-and-fabric biplane that kick started aviation history. At least four other teams are poised to launch flyers of their own, but Young is rushing to make it into the record books first—or become the race's first casualty.

By Carol Hoffman


	If you succeed try, try again: Orville Wright attempts to land a gilder at Kitty Hawk in 1911, while brother Lorin Wright and friend Alexander Ogilvie try, unsuccessfully, to keep it from flipping. (Hulton Archive)

"CHECK THIS OUT," says Rick Young, popping a videotape into one of three VCRs sitting on a 72-inch TV. We're standing in his cluttered basement in Richmond, Virginia, facing an electronics array worthy of a Stereophile centerfold: the television, the VCRs, a six-foot-high wall of speakers, a satellite receiver, three tape decks, and two CD players. Young, an ebullient, white-haired 52-year-old, thrusts a cell phone into the hands of his lanky mechanic and carpenter, Grover Cleveland Taylor, 34, and stashes a second phone in his shirt pocket. He grabs one of seven remotes and punches Play.

"OK, kids!" Young bellows. "Don't do this at home!"

Orchestral music booms from the speakers. Young appears on the giant screen, lying belly down in a replica of Orville and Wilbur Wright's 1902 glider—one of several experimental craft the Wrights developed en route to their historic 12-second, 120-foot first flight of a motorized airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903. Young gracefully soars off the giant dunes of Jockey's Ridge, a hang-gliding hot spot on the windswept shores of the Outer Banks, about four miles south of Kitty Hawk. He's working the elevator—the glider's control mechanism—wafting slowly over invisible air currents on a flimsy craft composed mainly of white linen, thin steel wire, and spindly ash spars.

"Watch. I'll push the nose down, dive, then flair," says Young. The glider dips, swoops low, noses up slightly, then settles gently onto the sand after its 20-second dance. The flight appears effortless. "Pretty cool, isn't it?"

It is. Especially since, aside from the Wright brothers, Young is the only person ever to have successfully flown such a plane.

In fact, Young, a risk-taking gadabout who amassed a small fortune in the restaurant business, is the only person to have built and flown replicas of all three of the Wrights' gliders, which they constructed between 1900 and 1903 as they worked toward their motorized plane. These projects cost Young roughly half a million dollars and countless hours, but they're just part of a larger quest that has consumed him for 30 years. Fascinated by the Wrights' creative and mechanical genius, Young is obsessed with understanding not only what they did, but how. This summer, he intends to take a precise replica of the motorized 1903 Wright Flyer into the air, re-creating for the first time in a hundred years the most famous flight in aviation history.

As Young knows, the particulars of the '03 Flyer are murky. When the original was ruined in a gust of wind after its fourth outing, the Wrights disassembled it and stuffed it into a crate. Orville later reassembled, and slightly modified, the '03 twice before delivering it to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., in 1948. (The aircraft now hangs in the Air and Space Museum.) But since the Wrights made no blueprints, historians don't know, among other things, exactly how the original wing ribs were built, or how much metal was used in the tail fittings. What is clear to modern experts is that the '03 was exceptionally unstable and dangerous, and that flying it at all required extraordinary courage and finesse. "The Wrights are lucky they never killed themselves," says Young.

With the 100th anniversary of the first flight fast approaching, the media have been hot after Young—as well as four other teams around the United States that are working to launch '03 replicas. But Young's obsession with authenticity far surpasses the competition's—to some, it even borders on the manic. He has drawn his own schematics by scrutinizing high-resolution computer scans of glass-plate photographs the Wrights took of their craft, allowing him to re-create details with unprecedented accuracy. "Some nights," Young says, "I lay awake in bed wondering if the Wrights would approve of how I spent my day."

The cell phone in Young's pocket chirps. It's a TV producer, trying to line up an interview. After a quick conversation, Young hangs up and exhales. Outwardly, he's all go-go-go, but he still has a lot of work to do, and the pressure is starting to get to him. He has yet to build the plane's horizontal and vertical stabilizers, the prop, the entire undercarriage. The engine is also behind schedule; it's being assembled by German engineer Udo Joerges, 47, a Wright enthusiast who lives in Berlin. Joerges has had the flu, but he expects to be finished by summer. Which might be too late—the other teams are scurrying as well.

Young looks pensively at Taylor. Their quirky relationship oscillates between paternal and fraternal, part father-son, part Wright brothers. Taylor left home at 16 and trained as an auto mechanic while living on his own during high school. He got a job doing repair work at one of Young's restaurants in 1989 and has been his steadfast—and only—full-time assistant ever since. Taylor scratches his goatee, then peers back at his boss.

"Grover, we've got some decisions to make," Young finally says. "I feel like I'm standing on the edge of a black hole."

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Carl Hoffman, author of Hunting Warbirds: The Obsessive Quest for the Lost Aircraft of World War II, lives in Washington, D.C

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