Gov Gab: Your U.S. Government Blog

Wright Brothers Day and Air Travel Tips for Modern Travelers

By: Jake | December 17, 2007 | Category: Travel

Pardon the interruption from your regularly scheduled holiday season, but today is Wright Brothers Day. You don’t have to deck your house with paper airplane streamers, but it’s worth remembering for a moment or 11 seconds to be exact.

Eleven seconds is how long Orville Wright flew his “glider” at the bottom of sandy Big Kill Devil Hill in North Carolina at 10:35 a.m. 104 years ago today. Before noon that day the Wright Brothers would also make the second, third and fourth successful powered flights in a heavier-than-air machine.

Wright Brothers National Memorial now stands near the spot where Orville went airborne that day. I say near because it’s not in the exact spot where the flights occurred since sand had covered most of the area when witnesses went to retrace it in 1929, but it is the site. To make the site permanent the monument builders grew grass to build a foundation for the memorial.

When I visited the memorial a couple of years ago the hill, wind and smell of the ocean gave me a sense of how secluded and exciting those first flights were.

The Wright Brothers’ flights were a far cry from today’s excitement of airport screenings, delays, lost baggage and other air travel concerns. The links I provided in the last sentence or the Transportation Security Administration’s air travel tips page and Pueblo's fly rights should help make your flight experience more like Orville’s.

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.