The First Airport - Huffman Prairie Flying Field, Ohio
Posted by: 
DougK
N 39° 48.422 W 084° 03.770
16S E 751440 N 4410468
Huffman Prairie Flying Field was the field where the Wright Brothers taught themselves to fly. From 1904-1905 they learned to launch, land, turn and bank through curves and figure eights, and sustain flight.
Waymark Code: WMFGM9
Location: Ohio, United States
Date Posted: 10/17/2012
Views: 8
Huffman Prairie Flying Field was the field where the Wright Brothers taught themselves to fly. From 1904-1905 they learned to launch, land, turn and bank through curves and figure eights, and sustain flight.
From 1910-1916, the Wilbur and Orville operated the Wright Company School of Aviation, where 119 early pilots were trained.
The flying field is an irregular-shaped piece of land with seven sides and seven corners. The NPS has placed a large, long, white flag on a pole at each of the seven corners to enable spotting the distant boundaries.
Today Huffman Prairie Flying Field is a wide open grassy meadow.
This is the first of many interpretative signs in the flying field that one encounters after crossing the bridge from the parking lot. It is near Corner Boundary No. 6.
The First Airport
If you walk just past these trees, you can visit the cradle of aviation - 84 acres
of ordinary pasture where Wilbur and Orville Wright taught themselves to fly.
in 1904, the Wrights knew they had to coax more from their brainchild than their
59-second straight-line hop at Kitty Hawk. For aviation to take its next steps, they
needed a convenient, private place -a flying field- closer to home.
It took eighteen months of bumps, crashes, and creative problem solving here to
learn how to safely launch, land, turn and bank. By the end of 1905, the Wrights
had a flying machine that was no longer a balky mechanical toddler, but a graceful,
fully functioning creature of the air.