Wright Flyer - with wing warping versus control surfaces

[albreji]

Love your videos, you seem to really enjoy your work.

I thought with all the challenging things your team does, why not try to recreate the original... Wing warping was such an unbelievable engineering challenge. Curtiss was able to boil down the concept and introduce control surfaces. I would love to see what your brilliant minds could come up with to be able to warp the wing surfaces with RC components.

 

[quorneng]

With a braced biplane 'wing warping' is structurally sound and elegantly simple. What the Wrights were not not fully aware, not surprising really, was the aerodynamic consequences of doing it. In effect adding 'wash in' to one wing. Not a good situation if you are flying close to the stall which the Wrights certainly were.