Wright Flyer III
| Wright Flyer III | |
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| The Wright Flyer III over Huffman Prairie, October 4, 1905 during its 46th flight | |
| Role | Experimental airplane |
| National origin | United States |
| Designer | Orville and Wilbur Wright |
| First flight | June 23, 1905 |
| Number built | 1 |
| Developed from | Wright Flyer II |
| Career | |
| Preserved at | Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park |
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Wright Flyer III
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Flyer III in the museum
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| Location | Dayton, Ohio |
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| Coordinates | 39°43′40″N 84°12′7″W / 39.72778°N 84.20194°WCoordinates: 39°43′40″N 84°12′7″W / 39.72778°N 84.20194°W |
| Built | 1905 |
| Architect | Wright, Orville; Wright, Wilbur |
| Architectural style | Other |
| NRHP Reference # | 90001747 |
| Added to NRHP | June 21, 1990 |
The Wright Flyer III was the third powered aircraft by the Wright Brothers, built during the winter of 1904-05. Orville Wright made the first flight with it on June 23, 1905. The Flyer III had an airframe of spruce construction with a wing camber of 1-in-20 as used in 1903, rather than the less effective 1-in-25 used in 1904. The new machine was equipped with the engine and other hardware from the scrapped Flyer II and—after major modifications—achieved much greater performance than Flyers I and II.
As initially built, the Flyer III looked almost the same as its predecessors and offered equally marginal performance. Orville suffered minor injuries in a serious nose-dive crash in the machine on July 14, 1905. When rebuilding the airplane, the Wrights made important design changes that solved the stability problems of the earlier models. They almost doubled the size of the elevator and rudder and moved them about twice the distance from the wings. They added two fixed half-moon shaped vertical vanes (called "blinkers") between the elevators (but later removed) and widened the skid-undercarriage which helped give the wings a very slight dihedral. They disconnected the rudder of the rebuilt Flyer III from the wing-warping control, and as in most future aircraft, placed it on a separate control handle. They also installed a larger fuel tank and mounted two radiators on front and back struts for extra coolant to the engine for the anticipated lengthy duration flights. When testing of Flyer III resumed in September, improvement was obvious. The pitch instability that had hampered Flyers I and II was brought under control. Crashes, some of which had been severe, no longer occurred. Flights with the redesigned aircraft started lasting over 20 minutes. The Flyer III became practical and dependable, flying reliably for significant durations and bringing its pilot back to the starting point safely and landing without damage.
On October 5, 1905 Wilbur made a circling flight of 24 miles (38.9 km) in 39 minutes 23 seconds, over Huffman Prairie, longer than the total duration of all the flights of 1903 and 1904. Four days later, they wrote to the United States Secretary of War William Howard Taft, offering to sell the world's first practical fixed-wing aircraft.
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