Orville and Wilbur Wright would be amazed! Their Wright Flyer is taking off again. By interweaving cutting-edge technology of today and historical data from the brothers’ efforts, the Wright Again project hopes to engage the next generation of scientists and engineers in a virtual laboratory on the Internet.
Working closely with the High Performance Computing, Education, and Research Center (HPCERC) at the University of New Mexico and NASA Ames Research Center’s Fluid Mechanics Laboratory, project directors Jani Macari Pallis, Ph.D., who is CEO of Cislunar Aerospace, Inc. and Karen Elinich, Director of Education and Technology at The Franklin Institute hope to reach the next generation of engineers and aviation scientists with an ongoing website as virtual lab.
Via a web-based curriculum developed by Dr. Pallis and The Franklin Institute, students will follow the course of Wilbur and Orville’s travails from their early interests as children, to the early disappointments in 1901 until the successful flight of December 17, 1903. The virtual environment substitutes computer codes for wind tunnel and flight facilities. Students can reproduce the Wright Brothers’ wind tunnel test and see flow details the two brothers never imagined.
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