Researchers are using the first plane to develop some ideas for future aircraft.

It was 98 years ago this week that Wilbur and Orville Wright took to the air in the first-ever controlled flight in a mechanically powered aircraft.

We've come a long way since then.

Instead of being content to skim a few feet above the ground, we're flying supersonic jets across the Atlantic and space shuttles into orbit.

But we're also looking back at the accomplishments of the Wright brothers -- and even developing some of their ideas for future aircraft.

First flight

It was on December 17, 1903, that Orville Wright took off from the sand dunes of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, aboard what was essentially a motorized glider.

The Wright brothers had spent the previous three years preparing for this flight, using gliders to experiment with different wing configurations and control mechanisms.

Now, a group of aviation researchers has built a replica of one of the early Kitty Hawk gliders. The researchers are testing it inside the wind tunnel at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

"The NASA Langley Research Center is involved in this because Orville Wright used to work here, way back in 1917 when the NASA Langley was created," Langley's Mike Finneran said. "It was created by a committee that Orville Wright was on. And so he spent a lot of time here, and all the work that's been done here since then is basically a takeoff on everything that Orville and Wilbur did. So we think this is pretty exciting, to be able to capture this history like this with these tests."

Testing the glider

Ken Hyde, founder of the Wright Experience, explained, "We're trying to capture and find out exactly why and how the Wright brothers, in four short years, were able to discover the secrets of flight, where the whole academic community had spent hundreds of years trying to discover flight. By building this 1901 glider -- testing the propellers and building all of the aircraft -- we'll go back and re-engineer all of the processing and fill in the puzzle pieces that are missing in their files and in their papers."

The researchers plan to measure the actual aerodynamic performance.

"We're going to measure its lift and drag as a function of speed and as a function of angle of attack," explained Bob Ash of Old Dominion University. "We're going to measure the pitching and rolling moments, and all the data we need to actually construct, if you wanted, a flight simulator of this airplane."

"The reason you'd like to have a flight simulator is because that gives you the ability to go back and compare the measured performance with how you might actually fly the airplane," Ash continued. "It gives you the ability to learn how to fly."

Wright Flyer replica

On the West coast, members of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) have constructed a full-size replica of the first actual motorized plane, which Orville and Wilbur had modestly called the Wright Flyer.

"The airplane is made out of wood and fabric and wire," explained Jack Cheume, the AIAA's Wright Flyer project chair. "The wood is usually spruce or fir, or in a few cases ash where they needed a more dense material. The fabric took us two years to find. It was a very special fabric that had been made by the JP Stevens Company.

"When the Smithsonian decided to re-cover their airplane, we just went along with them and got some of the fabric that they procured," Cheume added. "The most interesting thing is the chain drive. The chain drive was built by the Diamond Chain Company, which is still in existence, and they had the dies that were used to create the chain for the Wright brothers, and they made some chains specifically for us."

The replica was completed about two years ago and trucked to the giant wind tunnel at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. Although Orville and Wilbur Wright kept detailed notes on their work, not much is really known about the actual aeronautical dynamics of the first Flyer.

According to Wright Flyer replica test engineer Craig Hange, "The airplane itself only made four very short flights, so it actually flew less than four minutes total. The Wright brothers didn't have the instrumentation and such that we have today, so we now have the ability to measure the aerodynamics and document that and have it on record as to how this airplane really performed."

Wing warping again

The Wright brothers steered their planes by twisting or "warping" the shape of the wings. Doing so altered the wing's aerodynamic characteristics and forced the plane to change direction.

The technique of wing warping has now come full circle, reappearing on a state-of-the-art F-18 jet fighter.

NASA and the Air Force call it "active aero-elastic wing flight research." What it amounts to is bending and twisting the wings to maneuver the plane.

If the concept works on a high-speed jet such as the F-18, it could lead to thinner wings on future aircraft, and that could translate to improved fuel efficiency and greater payload capacity.

Wright's wind tunnel

The Wright brothers would undoubtedly be proud. They had built a crude 6-foot wind tunnel in their workshop back at the bicycle shop they operated in Dayton, Ohio.

The data they developed helped them with the original warped-wing idea, for which they are now given most of the credit.

"It was all 'figure it out for yourself.' And they did," said Gordon Werne, curator of history at the Hiller Aviation Museum in San Carlos, California. "They were a hardy group. People can laugh. It looks silly by today's standards to some people. But I look at them and I'm amazed. They did a heckuva job. They were the astronauts of their time."

Wilbur Wright died in 1912 at age 45 of typhoid fever. Orville lived to be 77, dying in 1948.

But the brothers' legacy will continue to develop as researchers match their findings of a century ago to the tools of the 21st century.

There's more information on the history of aviation and current research online: