Diligence, brilliance paid off for Wrights

Years of experimentation, careful planning, hard work and a touch of brilliance paid off for two brothers from Dayton, Ohio. Firing up a 12-hp., four-cylinder motor, hand-built in six weeks by Lincoln, Neb., native Charlie Taylor, Orville and Wilbur Wright flipped a coin, and Orville won the toss.

Climbing aboard the Wright Flyer, he revved the motor and pulled a rope to release the machine.

One hundred hears ago today, at 10:35 a.m., their fragile machine pushed against a 24-30 mph headwind at Kitty Hawk, N.C., rose to approximately 10 feet in altitude, and landed 120 feet from the point where it lifted from a wooden rail.

By noon, they had made four flights, the final attempt covering 852 feet, reaching an altitude of 15 feet and lasting 59 seconds.

It was nearly 10 years before the first airplane was seen in McCook, but the Wright Brothers' invention and the industry it spawned have had an unusual connection to McCook.

That first heavier-than-air visitor to McCook looked not much different than the Wright original. Taking off from a grass field on July 17, 1913, it circled the south edge of town before crashing while attempting to land in a muddy field.

Aircraft became more common as the years went by, and among the barnstormers who landed at the airstrip, then in west McCook, was a young aviator named Charles Lindbergh.

Flying caught the attention of McCook Daily Gazette founder Harry Strunk, who bought a 1929 Curtiss Robin, the "Newsboy" and put it to work for the paper, flying 380 miles non-stop each afternoon to deliver more than 5,000 newspapers to 40 towns. Only a year later, it was damaged in a tornado and sold for junk. It was rebuilt in the 1960s, however, and is now on display in Seattle.

It was the first airplane to be regularly used delivering newspapers, however, and still flies at the top of the front page every day.

The Newsboy and other early airplanes were just the beginning, however.

Man soon learned to use the Wright Brothers invention for war, and the United States responded. The McCook Army Air Base became a focal point of the war effort, as thousands of Army Air Force crews trained on hundreds of B-17s, B-24s and B-29s on their way to Europe and the Pacific.

The McCook Airport continued to be a busy place through the next decades, as people obtained their private pilot's license and sky sports such as ballooning, gliding, and ultra light aircraft gained popularity. McCook once hosted the national soaring championships, and the resurrected Freedom Flight hot air balloon rally is becoming a popular annual event.

Today, flight is accepted as routine, and the problems of making regular airline service financially profitable are the real challenge to aviation, not finding the right balance of thrust, lift and control to achieve flight.

The envelope of aviation has been expanded to the point that fragments of the original Wright Flyer rest on the moon, delivered there by the Apollo 11 astronauts. One hundred years later, we remember the innovators who made it all possible.