To celebrate the 100 year anniversary of flight, "Wright Again" leads elementary, middle, and high school students through the technical development of one of the most unique aircraft in the world—the first successfully flown powered airplane, the 1903 Wright Flyer. "Wright Again" will "virtually" recreate the development and construction of the Wright Flyer on the web.

Although there are many websites about the Wright Brothers, the materials are typically historical in nature. "Wright Again" is unique in that it follows the progress of the Wrights day by day, explains the successes and setbacks from a scientific perspective (aerodynamic, propulsion, control and structural), and extrapolates the lessons learned to useful, meaningful, classroom lessons and hands-on activities based on the national science standards. Project participants will use the original experimental data from the Wrights' wind tunnel journals via the web in our student activities!

New web materials will be posted as close to 100 years to the day that the events first occurred. From the time Wilbur and Orville Wright first become interested in flight as young boys in 1878, through their first successful flight at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903, the Wright Again team will reenact the brothers' successes and set-backs on the path to the first flight via the World Wide Web.

As aeronautical engineers and educators, it is insightful and sobering to read the accounts of the Wrights' work, knowing today's experiment will not succeed—a now well-known aerodynamic principle was not known in 1900. The Wright Again educational materials illustrate the basic principles of aeronautics, explain why an experiment did not work, and what the Wrights could have done to make the experiment successful.