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Over this 84-acre patch of rough pasture outside Dayton, now known as Huffman Prairie Flying Field, the Wrights undertook the difficult and sometimes dangerous task of creating a dependable, fully controllable airplane and training themselves to be pilots. They made hundreds of flights here after developing the 1905 Wright Flyer III (the plane they considered to be the first practical airplane), testing the aircraft built by The Wright Company. At the Wright School of Aviation, also located here, they trained more than a hundred pilots, including the flyers for the Wright Exhibition Team and the first military flyers. The U.S. Army Signal Corps purchased the field in 1917 and renamed it, along with 2,000 adjacent acres, Wilbur Wright Field. In 1948 Wright-Patterson Air Force Base was established here. Today visitors can see where the Wrights developed the world’s first practical airplane as well as replicas of their 1905 hangar and launching catapult.
The associated Huffman Prairie Flying Field Interpretive Center is located at the Wright Memorial on an overlook about 2 miles from the flying field. This facility addresses the specific problems Orville and Wilbur Wright encountered while they were perfecting their flying machine, their first demonstration flights in the United States and in Europe, their exhibition team, and their manufacturing facility in Dayton, OH. The center also highlights the continuing legacy of Orville and Wilbur Wright as embodied in the development of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and the continuing aeronautical research at this Air Force facility.
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