A flight to remember.

Byline: Susan Palmer The Register-Guard

The Wright Flyer was one scary aircraft, a flimsy fabric-and-stick concoction with no throttle, minimal controls and just one saving grace.

It could fly.

Not well, not far, but enough to make history in a 120-foot, 12-second ride that carried Orville and Wilbur Wright into history 100 years ago today as the world's first inventors and pilots of a powered heavier-than-air craft.

This morning, a pilot with an exact replica will attempt to re-enact that flight in the dunes of Kill Devil Hills near Kitty Hawk, N.C. - and Wally Anderson of Eugene will be there to savor the thrill.

The success of the re-enactment isn't a given, said Anderson, a 57-year-old pilot. The machine is so challenging to control that it crashed on a recent test flight and had to be repaired.

And yet so much of what we take for granted - half-day flights from East Coast to West, space travel that flings humans beyond the bounds of gravity - had its birth on the tenuous wings of the Wright brothers' improbable biplane.

Anderson, speaking from North Carolina by cell phone, wanted a chance to relive how flight began on that windy December day in 1903.

"Things that happened before you were born are so hard to get hold of," he said.

He joins thousands of visitors who have traveled to Kill Devil Hills to see daily air shows that highlight the changes the Wright brothers ushered in, from the roar of fighter jets to the stunning Osprey, a tilt-rotor aircraft that lands and takes off like a helicopter but has the speed and range of a turboprop airplane.

"Look at the advancement in that 100-year period," Anderson said. "That's the reason we came, to celebrate that."

About 40,000 people, including President Bush, will watch today's re-enactment.

For Anderson, the love of planes began before he could even articulate the fact. His parents have a picture of him at age 3 standing on the wing of a plane at an air show. His uncle was a B-17 belly gunner during World War II, and he recalls his father always heading out to the fields when the barnstormers blew in to offer rides.

Anderson learned to fly 30 years ago and still recalls the tremendous thrill of his first solo flight in a Cessna 150.

"Finally, you're good enough to fly this airplane by yourself. You have the competency to get up in the air and back down safely. You're able to control a machine like that in an environment that we're not born in," he said.

Since those first tentative flights, Anderson has gone on to build two experimental planes and has joined the Experimental Aircraft Association. He also serves on the Homebuilt Aircraft Council.

Other members of the local experimental aircraft chapter will celebrate the first flight here with a loop over the southern Willamette Valley, weather permitting.

"It's fun to do something that makes me feel like I'm paying homage to the Wright brothers," said Randy Stout, a local pilot planning to participate. "The world has changed in so many ways and 1903 was a huge year for change."

That same year, Henry Ford founded Ford Motor Co. and the first trans-Atlantic telegram signals were sent and received between Europe and the United States. But for Stout, the Wright brothers' accomplishment stands out among those world-altering events.

"Aviation, it changed everybody's life," he said.

OREGON AVIATION HISTORY

Wright connections: Wilbur and Orville Wright's father, Milton Wright, spent three years in Oregon before he married and had children. A bishop of the United Brethren Church, he did missionary work in Oregon's mining camps. He returned to Illinois in 1859.

License to fly: Oregon was the first state in the nation to regulate aviation, founding the Oregon State Board of Aeronautics in 1921 that tested the competency of pilots and the airworthiness of their craft.

Out standing in our field: The first people to circumnavigate the globe via plane - three Army aviators flying biplanes in 1924 - stopped at Eugene's old airport at Chambers and West 18th Avenue on the outward bound leg of their journey, which originated in Seattle. They also stopped in Eugene on their return. The trio traveled 27,534 miles in 175 days with an average speed of 76 mph. One of the pilots, Lowell Smith, had flown fire patrol for the U.S. Forest Service out of Eugene during the summers of 1920 through 1922. The pilots told reporters at the time that they wouldn't attempt a similar flight "for a million dollars" or unless they were ordered to.

Stunt woman: Portland resident Dorothy Hester took up flying as a teenager and made the record books at 19 when in 1930 she was the first woman to fly a plane in an outside loop, essentially a forward somersault. The next year, she set a record for both men and women with 56 inverted snap rolls, which send a plane corkscrewing through the air, and a woman's record of 62 perfect outside loops, earning her the title of "The Greatest Woman Acrobatic Pilot on Earth."

Next best thing: Oregon pilot Lee Eyerly opened a flying school in Salem and developed one of the nation's first flight simulators in 1931. The simulator was so popular, he began churning them out as amusement rides, and his company, Eyerly Aircraft, spent the ensuing decades building such favorites as the Loop-O-Plane and the Octopus.

Land here: An image of one of the state's smallest airfields, the privately owned Jasper Ridge near Creswell, is included in Microsoft's flight simulator game as a choice of landing sites for players.

LOCAL CENTENNIAL EVENTS

Fly-over: Area pilots will fly out of the Creswell Airport, heading south to Cottage Grove, then north to Springfield, Coburg and Harrisburg, then curving back over Junction City and Eugene before ending in Creswell, weather permitting, from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. today. Pilots from the Oregon Antique & Classic Aircraft Club and the Experimental Aviation Association will fly a variety of planes nose to tail.

Another Wright: Cottage Grove State Airport will honor resident Jim Wright, who died in the crash of his Hughes H-1B replica aircraft last summer in Yellowstone National Park. Officials will dedicate Jim Wright Field at 2 p.m. with a ceremony at the site of the new airport sign at Row River Road and Thornton Lane. If it rains, the ceremony will be in the H-1 Hanger by Wright Machine Tool Inc. at 365 Palmer Ave.

CAPTION(S):

Al Sherman of Cottage Grove flies his experimental biplane (foreground) in formation with Wilbur Heath, also of Cottage Grove, and his 1948 Aeronca Sedan. They will join other area pilots today in a fly-over of the southern Willamette Valley to celebrate the Wright brothers' first-flight anniversary. In this photograph taken in 1924, crew members of a U.S. Army group of three biplanes attempting a flight around the globe gather in front of their planes in Eugene. See Page A11 for a recap of Oregon aviation history.