On this day in aviation history, 115 years ago (October 24, 1911), Orville Wright remained aloft for 9 minutes and 45 seconds in the Wright 1911 Glider above Kill Devil Hill, North Carolina. Flying in winds of approximately 40 mph, Wright established a soaring endurance record that would remain unbroken for the next ten years. Eight years after achieving powered flight, Orville returned to the Kill Devil Hills in 1911 with a newly designed glider and his English friend Alec Ogilvie. The aircraft was considerably more advanced than the gliders Orville and Wilbur had experimented with between 1900 and 1902. Instead of their earlier canard configuration with the elevator ahead of the wings, the 1911 aircraft used a conventional tailplane behind the wing.
The pilot’s accommodations had also evolved. Rather than lying prone and controlling wing warping through a hip cradle as in the Wrights’ earlier gliders, Orville sat upright and operated the aircraft using hand controls. He had originally intended to use the glider to experiment with an automatic control system, but abandoned those tests because reporters were present. He later perfected the system using a powered aircraft in 1913. The 1911 Wright Glider measured 21 feet 6 inches in length with a wingspan of 32 feet and stood 9 feet 10 inches high. Its wings covered approximately 300 square feet, while the empty aircraft weighed only 170 pounds. Orville’s 9-minute, 45-second flight on October 24 remained a world gliding endurance record until 1921, when it was finally surpassed in Germany by Wolfgang Klemperer.
