First Flight

The Wright Brothers National Memorial was well worth a visit. Not widely known, their work actually did not take place in Kitty Hawk, but at Kill Devil Hill a few miles to the south ... a more aptly named place for how hard they worked to build that airplane!

Great replicas of the glider and the plane. Markers for the points their first four engine-powered flights reached (they crashed on number 4).

One of the reasons that the Wright brothers choose the site was that the sand dunes were an excellent launching place for their glider experiments, and the sand provided a soft landing when they crashed. There was no sand to be seen anywhere, grass had been planted in the 1920s and it now covered the entire site.Read more