THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, August 8, 1994 TAG: 9408080051
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: THE POTOMAC NEWS
DATELINE: WARRENTON LENGTH: Long : 103 lines
Ken Hyde stands convinced that he has the Wright stuff.
To prove his point, Hyde plans to teach himself to fly - as soon as he builds his airplane.
Actually, Hyde, 55, of Warrenton can already fly planes as diverse as the 1918 Curtiss ``Jenny'' that sits in a hangar on his property to the Boeing 727 he flies as an American Airlines pilot.
He learned to fly when he was 16, trading labor for lessons from barnstormer Charlie Culp at the old Manassas Airport. He earned his mechanic's license at the same time.
But the model Hyde proposes to pilot next hasn't been flown for 60 years - Wilbur and Orville Wright's Model B Flyer.
For the past 22 months, Hyde has been building a nonflying replica of the Wright brothers' Model B, one of the first production aircraft ever built.
The finished biplane sits nose to nose with the ``Jenny'' in a wooden hangar on Hyde's property north of Warrenton.
The Wright replica will soon be trucked to Fort Rucker, Ala., where it will have a permanent home at the U.S. Army Aviation Museum. Then Hyde can begin work on the one that will fly.
Everything about the Army plane is as authentic as exhaustive research and 10,000 hours of work can make it. The biggest obstacle in constructing the plane was the Wright brothers themselves.
``The research was the hardest,'' Hyde said. ``They were pretty secretive with information and drawings.''
Self-styled airplane manufacturers proliferated within years after Orville and Wilbur began the aviation age with their initial flight Dec. 17, 1903, at Kill Devil Hills near Kitty Hawk.
Though the Wrights' original 1903 Flyer, now hanging in the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, was never intended for production, the brothers were soon at work on their Model B.
``There were an awful lot of quacks,'' Hyde said. ``For every successful aircraft company, there were 10 to 12 that were a fraud.''
The Wrights, former bicycle builders, went to great lengths to protect their airplane patents. They ``aluminized'' their spruce struts with silver paint to blend with the silver-plate photographs of the time. They hid blueprints and calculations so well that many have never surfaced. They even stopped flying completely for several years so that would-be competitors wouldn't steal their secrets.
The Wrights' Model B became one of the most successful aircraft of the time, once setting a world altitude record of 11,474 feet at an air meet in Denver in December 1910. Many of their planes were built in their Dayton, Ohio, factories.
Stunt pilots used the Model B to delight crowds at air shows, Hyde said.
But the flights had caught the fancy of the public and they demanded more and more difficult stunts. The Model B was never intended to do loops and high-speed dives. Planes crashed, pilots died and the Model B lost its appeal to barnstormers. Few Model Bs survived the daredevil era.
When Army officials came to Hyde and asked him to undertake building a Model B replica, he assembled a team that included Greg Cone, a tool-and-die maker; Andrew King, an authority on the golden age of flight who earned his wings as a teenager with a barnstorming air circus; Hyde's wife, Beverly, a flight attendant with her own pilot's license; and Wendy Hyde, his nephew's wife, who helped Beverly stitch together the white cotton muslin wing coverings.
The team had to fan out and begin filling in the gaps left by the secretive Wrights.
The only surviving Model B Flyer hangs in Philadelphia's Franklin Institute. The museum let Hyde's crew take measurements.
A man in New Hampshire had the twisted, hacksawed remains of a Model B that crashed in 1911. The Air Force Museum loaned the team a set of wing panels for study. At the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, the crew got to go over the Wrights' lightweight, four-cylinder motor and a 1909 Model A - the world's first military airplane - donated by the Army Signal Corps. They also examined other Wright aircraft and the museum's extensive files.
Piece by piece the project came together. The side-by-side pilot seats were difficult to produce until Hyde found some of the wide-welt burgundy corduroy cloth used for the coverings.
The team worked in a hangar on property Hyde bought in 1971 because it offered a grass airstrip. The hangar was the first building erected on the property.
Building the replica has been an adventure, but they're ready now to fly.
``The purpose of this was to get enough data to see if it was feasible,'' Hyde said.
``When we took it out of the hangar and took pictures of it we all oohed and aahed about how it changed colors,'' Hyde said. ``Just think what it would look like in the air.''
The more they examined their first effort, the more they were convinced they could build one to fly. In building the first replica, they duplicated many of the components needed for the upcoming task.
Hyde plans to begin work later this year and hopes to finish in time for test flights next summer off sod fields south of Fredericksburg.
He will have to teach himself to fly as he goes, as the Model B controls are a world removed from cockpit of a 727.
Hyde will be flying a craft no one has flown since 1934. A few reproductions have been made, but they used modern engines that changed the flight characteristics of the plane.
``This is the only one that's going to look like it, sound like it, smell like it,'' Cone said. ``It'll be a real live time machine.'' by CNB