Wonder If Orville and Wilbur Started This Way?

The Old Man has a lifelong attraction to airplanes. I've built models that actually occasionally flew, built many that wouldn't, and some that were scale and never meant to. I've earned a pilot's license and flown a circle around the Wright Brothers Memorial in Kitty Hawk, NC. I still have on my lifetime "to do" list to ride in an open cockpit plane. So many good memories, but none can compare with the time that Kenny and I decided to build one we could actually fly in.

It was summer; that grand period when time stood still. There were endless hours to play ball, play "war", or just sit around shooting the breeze. Probably during one of the "breeze-shooting" sessions, Kenny and I hatched a plan to build an airplane. It seemed simple enough.....get some kind of box we could sit in, and nail on a wing and some wheels. We figured we wouldn't need a motor since our take-off roll was down a long hill on Baltimore Avenue. Our plan was to launch and then glide around and land softly in his back yard. Simple.

And so, construction began. Under our back porch, I found a wooden box. It had at one time held produce or some such. I think I remember it as an orange crate. Perfect. Kenny boosted a 6-7 foot two-by-four from his dad's stash and our B-17 (Retrospectively short for Bungle-17) began to take shape. We nailed the 2 x 4 across the front lip of the box with some little finishing nails (about 100 of them, after all, the fun was seeing how many we could actually get in without bending) and added a couple of L-shaped braces I found in my dad's tool bin.

For a tail, we found a piece of board my dad had in the basement, and nailed it to the bottom of the orange crate so that it stuck out the back. For main wheels we raided the remains of one of my old tricycles and for a tail wheel, Kenny got one off one of his dad's old lawn mowers.

We figured we didn't need a steering mechanism since we were only going to be going in a straight line down that hill and only for a short time until we lifted off. Landings would follow suit. Really, really junk science.

First flight day dawned hot and humid as Bedford can be. We were up at first light and out to the "hanger" (Open space under the butterfly bush). We struggled and rolled, tugged and tusseled the "Flawed Flyer" to the top of the hill on Baltimore Avenue. On a business trip to Chicago, my dad had bought for me a kids' version of a leather flying helmet...complete with goggles. As a result, I was named captain and Kenny was my co-pilot. We hopped in the cockpit and off we went.

"Malfunction, malfunction, abort abort". About one third of the way down the hill, catastrophic dis-assembly occurred. The wing came off, both wheels went sideways, and Kenny and I polished the gravel on the side of the road. We skidded so far along the shoulder on our behinds, that for several weeks I expected to see bits of gravel in the commode.

We got patched up with Mercurochrome and Band-aids and moved on to other adventures. Kenny later served on helicopters in Viet Nam and said that he often thought of that disastrous first attempt at flight. I still have that leather flying helmet, although the goggles are long gone. It hangs in my workshop and every time I see it, I think of that day......and of Kenny.