KITTY HAWK, NORTH CAROLINA, IS A place justly famed, for there on December 17,1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright demonstrated that heavier-than-air flight was possible. Huffman Prairie, Ohio, is a place unjustly ignored, for in that 85-acre pasture in 1904 and 1905 the Wrights converted flight from the barely possible to the truly practical. At Kitty Hawk the Wrights made four flights, their best being WiIbur’s wavering voyage of 852 feet in a machine he struggled to keep airborne. At Huffman, several miles outside Dayton, the Wrights made 154 flights, ending with journeys of 24 miles in an aircraft they could launch, control, and land at will.

The 1903 aircraft was something of a rough draft; possibly it was the worst airplane ever to fly. The 1905 machine was a completed work; it was the first finished airplane. And it was a work finished in a little-known Ohio pasture.

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