Remembering the Wright Bros.– and Otto Lilienthal

By Lucy Papachristou | Outer Banks Voice on December 18, 2019

Tuesday, Dec. 17 marked the 116th anniversary of Orville and Wilbur Wright’s first successful flight, an historic event commemorated each year at the Wright Brothers National Memorial in Kill Devil Hills.

Also participating in this year’s program was a German aeronautics professor and aviation enthusiast, Markus Raffel, who made the trip to the Outer Banks to highlight the important historical connection between early German aviation and the Wright brothers’ famed flight.

In 1891, a full 12 years before the Wright brothers flew, a German design engineer named Otto Lilienthal made a historic flight of his own in his Derwitzer glider, an unpowered hang glider of his own invention, in a rural area west of Potsdam.

The flight was made in front of thousands of people and over a hundred photographs were taken of the event. “It was really a shift, a spark for everyone to believe in winged flight,” Raffel said. “This was all uncontrolled, unpowered. But it was flight, in front of thousands of witnesses.”

From that first flight until his death, Lilienthal completed more than 2,000 gliding flights using many different designs, logging more than five hours of flying time, according to the Otto Lilienthal Museum. He died in August 1896, when his glider stalled and he fell about 50 feet to the ground, breaking his neck.

Lilienthal’s groundbreaking technical book Birdflight as the Basis of Aviation (1889) revolutionized the field of aviation, and his death was a huge inspiration for the Wrights brothers to start building their aircraft, Raffel said.

The Wright brothers were introduced to Lilienthal by the book Progress in Flying Machines (1894), written by the brothers’ friend and fellow aviator Octave Chanute, which included in its appendix an article by Lilienthal.

“[Lilienthal] presented the cause of human flight to his readers so earnestly, so attractively, and so convincingly that it was difficult for anyone to resist the temptation to make an attempt at it himself,” Wilbur Wright wrote in 1912. “No one equaled him in fullness and dearness of understanding of the principles of flight…and no one did so much to transfer the problem of human flight to the open air where it belonged.”

Raffel came to the anniversary celebrations as a kind of steward of Lilienthal’s legacy. In addition to his professorship at Hanover University in Hanover, Germany, he heads the Institute of Aerodynamics and Flow Technology Helicopters at the German Aerospace Center in Göttingen.

Using his own money, Raffel purchased a replica of Lilienthal’s glider several years ago. The lightweight machine can be folded into a box for easy transport. There were nine original replicas made, but only four remain, excluding Raffel’s — one in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., and three in Europe. Gustav, Otto’s brother, destroyed many of the gliders after the Wright brothers’ flight.

“After Lilienthal crashed and died, no one wanted to fly the glider anymore. There was rapid development and everyone was building his own improved aircraft,” Raffel explained.

But Raffel is certainly interested in flying his replica, even though his height and weight (he is over six feet tall) make it difficult for him to fly. He said he has only flown the glider once himself.

But this past Saturday, Raffel and several colleagues took the replica out for a flight on Jockey’s Ridge. Many people came to watch the delicate, graceful glider take to the air. Nine people took a turn flying, Raffel said, including Andy Beam, a friend of his and a stuntman who owns a hang-gliding business in Los Angeles. Raffel’s team also flew the glider in California this past July.

Historical achievements are more often than not products of collaboration, and Raffel hopes his presentation demonstrated the influence of German inventors like Lilienthal on the Wright brothers.

If you put Lilienthal’s glider and the Wright brothers’ plane “side by side, it’s like a line,” he said. “You can see the enormous development in just six years, from a bird-like winged structure to a real airplane with controls.”