In 1908 Wilbur Wright flew in public near Le Mans, France, and amazed the crowds. He was a cautious pilot who inspected his airplane carefully before each takeoff. The Wrights launched with a catapult: the airplane was tied by cables and pulleys to a weight in a tower, and when the weight fell it pulled the plane along a wooden rail fast enough to take off. For more than two years after 1905 they had not flown in public, to protect their invention before it was patented or sold. The Army wanted an airplane that could be taken apart and moved by an army wagon, could carry two people, and could reach a speed of at least 40 miles per hour in still air.

The Army's test flights took place at Fort Myer, Virginia. On September 17, 1908, Orville took off with Lt. Thomas Selfridge, the Army's observer, as passenger. A propeller blade split, and Selfridge was killed, the first person to die in a powered airplane accident. Orville was severely injured, and in later years the vibration of flight irritated his sciatic nerve, a lingering condition from that crash. In 1909 the Wrights returned to Fort Myer with a new airplane, and on July 27 Orville made a record flight of 1 hour, 12 minutes and 40 seconds with a passenger.

On a 10-mile test the 1909 airplane averaged 42.5 mph, and for the 2 mph over the required 40 the Wrights earned an extra $5,000, making the final price $30,000. The brothers formed the Wright Company to build and sell airplanes and train pilots. Yet the Patent Office had received so many similar applications over 50 years that it decided to reject automatically all applications for machines that had not already flown. Wilbur became preoccupied with the many patent infringement lawsuits the Wrights had filed; it was as much a matter of principle as money. Glenn Curtiss, a rival American aviator, developed ailerons on his own, and they eventually replaced the Wrights' wing-warping mechanism.

In 1896 Samuel Langley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, flew a steam-powered model called an aerodrome, the first large-scale heavier-than-air machine to fly, but it had no steering capability. His two full-size aerodromes failed in the fall of 1903, the second just nine days before the Wrights' successful flight. Within a dozen years after the first powered flight the U.S. government formed the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA) to advance the field of aeronautics. Orville spent the last three decades of his life serving on boards and committees related to aeronautics, including the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.

After its last flight on December 17, 1903, a gust of wind tipped over the Flyer, and it never flew again. It sat in a shed behind the Wrights' bicycle shop for more than a decade, and the March 1913 Dayton flood put its crates under water and mud for eleven days. In 1948 the Flyer went from the London Science Museum to the Smithsonian Institution. As of November 2026, it is on display in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. A piece of cloth the size of a postage stamp from its wing was attached to the Mars helicopter Ingenuity, which on April 19, 2021, made the first powered aircraft flight on a world other than Earth.

Words to know

• ailerons: hinged wing flaps
• infringement: rule-breaking use
• aeronautics: flight science
• sciatic: leg nerve