Looking Toward the Next 100 Years of Flight

In this issue, we commemorate the 100th anniversary of controlled, sustained flight by a powered heavier-than-air craft. Dec. 17, 1903, was the historic day in Kitty Hawk, N.C. Orville Wright was the pilot and Wilbur ran alongside steadying the right wing as the plane gathered speed along a 60-ft monorail track. The flight lasted 12 seconds and covered 120 ft, but a camera had been set up and captured the scene just after liftoff for posterity. The brothers flew three more times that day, covering 852 ft in their final 59-second flight.

"After the last flight, the machine was carried back to camp and set down in what was thought to be a safe place," Wilbur and Orville wrote in Century Magazine in 1908. "But a few minutes later…a sudden gust of wind struck the machine and started to turn it over. All made a rush to stop it, but we were too late."

So in the spring of 1904, the brothers began again at Simms Station, eight miles east of Dayton, Ohio. "We were permitted to erect a shed and to continue experiments," they wrote in the magazine.

Perhaps that shed could be considered the precursor of the airport, because the Wright brothers were soon making regular flights there, rapidly increasing in length. Later in 1908, they secured a U.S. government contract to supply a flyer carrying two men and supplies for a 125-mile flight at 40 miles per hour.

As we come upon this milestone, the editors of Engineering News-Record and Architectural Record wanted to take note of the chapter that it opened in our field–the design and construction of airports. So as not to dwell on the past, we are exploring the future of airports, as well.

Among stories in this issue are those about airport terminal design by freelance architectural writer Jayne Merkel and the impact of low-cost, regional carriers and security by ENR transportation editor Aileen Cho. This issue of ENR also is being distributed to 10,000 Architectural Record subscribers identified as being actively involved in airport design.

Wilbur and Orville wrote, "We had taken up aeronautics merely as a sport. We reluctantly entered upon the scientific side of it. But we soon found the work so fascinating that we were drawn into it deeper and deeper."

The past 100 years have been fascinating, both on the airside and the groundside of flight. Read more about it in the special report beginning on p. 34.

Janice L. Tuchman
Editor-in-Chief