Lessons from the Wright Brothers

If a technology may introduce catastrophic risks, how do you develop it?

It occurred to me that the Wright Brothers’ approach to inventing the airplane might make a good case study.

The catastrophic risk for them, of course, was dying in a crash. This is exactly what happened to one of the Wrights’ predecessors, Otto Lilienthal, who attempted to fly using a kind of glider. He had many successful experiments, but one day he lost control, fell, and broke his neck.

Believe it or not, the news of Lilienthal’s death motivated the Wrights to take up the challenge of flying. Someone had to carry on the work! But they weren’t reckless. They wanted to avoid Lilienthal’s fate. So what was their approach?

First, they decided that the key problem to be solved was one of control. Before they even put a motor in a flying machine, they experimented for years with gliders, trying to solve the control problem. As Wilbur Wright wrote in a letter:

When once a machine is under proper control under all conditions, the motor problem will be quickly solved. A failure of a motor will then mean simply a slow descent and safe landing instead of a disastrous fall.

When actually experimenting with the machine, the Wrights would sometimes stand on the ground and fly the glider like a kite, which minimized the damage any crash could do:

When they did go up in the machine themselves, they flew relatively low. And they did all their experimentation on the beach at Kitty Hawk, so they had soft sand to land on.

All of this was a deliberate, conscious strategy. Here is how David McCullough describes it in his biography of the Wrights:

Well aware of how his father worried about his safety, Wilbur stressed that he did not intend to rise many feet from the ground, and on the chance that he were “upset,” there was nothing but soft sand on which to land. He was there to learn, not to take chances for thrills. “The man who wishes to keep at the problem long