Orville Wright

On 17 December 1903, near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville Wright piloted the first of four flights made that day in the powered Wright Flyer he and his brother Wilbur had designed and built. The flight lasted about 12 seconds and covered 120 feet; Wilbur flew the longest of the four, 852 feet in 59 seconds.

Orville flew the U.S. Army acceptance trials at Fort Myer, Virginia, which began in September 1908 and were completed in July 1909. On 27 July 1909 he stayed aloft for over an hour with a passenger, and on 30 July he flew the cross-country speed test to Alexandria and back; the Army formally accepted the machine on 2 August.

Orville developed an automatic stabilizer for the Wright airplane and, on 31 December 1913, demonstrated it in 17 flights before an Aero Club of America committee, making seven turns in the last with his hands off the controls. In 1920 he developed a split wing flap with James Jacobs, patented in 1924.

In his dispute with the Smithsonian, Orville reduced his case to a side-by-side list of 35 differences between Samuel Langley's 1903 Aerodrome and the rebuilt machine flown in 1914, from camber and guy-post positions to carburettor and floats, each tied to Langley's own published Memoir. When the Smithsonian printed the list in October 1942, its secretary wrote that the Institution accepted it 'as correct in point of facts'.

Answering a public controversy with a checkable, item-by-item list sits alongside the profile's high detail orientation score. The fact that his opponent accepted the list is what gives this episode its weight. Detail Orientation

In autumn 1903 Octave Chanute told the brothers that chain drives usually lost about 20 per cent of their power, far more than the 5 per cent they had allowed. In his own later account Orville describes how they hung a drive chain over a sprocket with bags of sand on each side and measured the extra weight needed to move it, which put the loss at about 5 per cent.

Testing an expert's warning with a simple measurement instead of simply accepting it or ignoring it is consistent with the profile's analytical rigor score. The account is Orville's own and describes joint work, which is why that row carries only moderate confidence. Analytical Rigour

In 1914 the Smithsonian had Langley's 1903 Aerodrome rebuilt and flown by Glenn Curtiss, the Wrights' opponent in patent litigation, and then described it as the first airplane capable of carrying a man. After his efforts to get the claim corrected failed, Orville shipped the 1903 Wright Flyer to the Science Museum in London in January 1928. It stayed abroad until after his death; in 1942 the Smithsonian published a statement correcting the record, and in 1948 the Flyer went on display in Washington.

Sending the country's most famous aircraft overseas to press a factual correction offers one example of the profile's conflict tolerance, marked dual-edged. Historian Tom Crouch places most of the fault with the Smithsonian, while noting that Charles Lindbergh also found Orville 'not an easy man to deal with'. Conflict Tolerance