[Aktungbby]

What is actually the most amazing secret of the whole business that has come to light is the absolutely amazing efficiency of the home-made hand-honed spruce pusher muslin-tipped propellers. The Wright brothers were extremely careful of their patent potential and left relatively few records. Tests however, in today's modern wind tunnels on the propellers, themselves wing airfoil surfaces, reveal the amazing 20-years-ahead-of-their-time painstaking ability of the Wrights to get an inherently unstable aircraft up in some serious winds using the engine they had. The secret is actually in the two pusher airfoils, the propellers themselves. Today's propellers operate at 85% efficiency; the Wrights,( arguably history's first PropWrights?) concluding that propellers were themselves airfoils, got IT right the FIRST time and produced flawless blades that operated at over 80% efficiency! Engineering genius at the 'dawn of flight'. http://www.dirdim.com/port_featuredprojects.php?fileName=fp_wrightbros ...puts new spin on what we thought we knew!