The Wrights depended on intuition when they were learning to fly by gliding at Kitty Hawk. They were superb sportsmen and bicycle riders. They tended to take chances, riding bicycles at night at high speed. Later in life, Orville racked up many speeding tickets in a high performance automobile. Typical pilot behavior.
But they did not depend on intuition in the design phase. They depended on data. Testing, testing and more testing with the wind tunnel. Page after page and book after book of engineering equations. They marked the spot of every piece of furniture in the room, and the spot where they stood, while operating the wind tunnel, because they found significant differences in the 3 decimal place when they moved a table or stood somewhere else. Chanute asked them once about the wind resistance of the pilot's body. They responded with several paragraphs of precise calculations of the wind resistance of the human head and prone body of a pilot (since they flew lying down in the early flights). They had "a low tolerance for imprecision" someone said. Crouch wrote: "Wilbur was a man who established a goal with care, then never lost sight of it. He was the perfect engineer – isolating a basic problem, defining it in the most precise terms, and identifying the missing bits of information that would enable him to solve it. Other students of the subject lost themselves in a welter of confusing details; they were lured into extraneous, if fascinating, blind alleys that led away from the basic problem. Not Wilbur. He had the capacity to recognize and the dogged determination required to cut straight to the heart of any matter." (p. 165) I wish more cold fusion researchers had these qualities. Although they were fact-based engineers, they had a lyrical side to their personalities. I think it was Orville many years later who was asked: What was the most wonderful thing about inventing the airplane? What was the moment they gave you the most pleasure? The success of the first flight? The public adulation? He said, as I recall, "the most wonderful thing was thinking about flying, and dreaming about what it would be like, before we did it." - Jed
