In front of the Flyer was a tall, slender man dressed in the green and gray of the U.S. National Park Service (NPS). He was speaking in a soft, almost lilting, unfamiliar Southern drawl, and as he spoke people slowed, stopped, turned to look him in the eye, and then settled in, captured by the story he told. 

It was about the Wright brothers, and how they learned to fly.

You’d think that the story of Orville and Wilbur’s trials at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, the winter of 1903 would be old news in a crowd as sophisticated as the aviation literate enthusiasts who attend EAA AirVenture Oshkosh, but, frankly, any good story is in the telling. And historian Darrell Collins knows how to settle a crowd, even a crowd as tough and educated as that one at EAA AirVenture. 

Within minutes of my arrival at the museum the group listening spellbound to Collins’ description of the “Miracle at Kitty Hawk” swelled up the stairway and around the balcony on the upper level. His cool, steady voice rose just enough so that all could hear how Orville and Wilbur developed a complicated system of spruce wood, wire, and pulleys attached to a cradle one wore around the hips—all designed to turn their innovative aircraft. 

When describing the “Wright Boogie,” Collins swayed his hips this way, and that, and one could envision how the brothers did it, leaning into the turns as they did when they raced the bicycles they had built in their Dayton, Ohio, shop during the 1890s. 

By the end of the half-hour experience a thousand people had paused in the museum, some for a few minutes, but most for the whole of Collins’ detailed recitation. After his thank you and their applause they pushed forward, almost a ground swell, to get a better look, shake Collins’ hand, or ask some obscure question pertaining to the subject matter. Collins didn’t shrink from the crowd, but smiled and took whatever time was necessary to answer each question, acknowledge each compliment. He was a study in grace. 

As a journalist assigned to interview him, my job was to out-wait the onlookers and listeners eager for a one-on-one with him. This usually takes a little patience and a few minutes—maybe half an hour if the speaker is really popular or famous. But Darrell Collins was just an NPS ranger from the Wright Brothers National Memorial—talented and article-worthy, but not famous. So I thought. 
It took me three days of waiting, three days of listening, mesmerized each time, to his story, before I could catch a few minutes alone with him. By the time I had my time alone with him, I was caught, too. I wanted to know how this man had become so passionate about a couple of bicycle mechanics who figured out how to mount engines and people on kites and make them fly.

Growing up on Roanoke Island, North Carolina, the Wright Brothers National Memorial at Kitty Hawk was but a place nearby for Collins. Four generations of his family had farmed, hunted, and fished on the Outer Banks’ barrier islands, all of them descendants of an escaped slave who found refuge on the isolated barrier island where the infamous “Lost Colony” was established and then vanished in a lonesome winter four hundred years ago. Neither college on the mainland nor work could draw Collins away from the haunting beauty of the windswept coastlines of his home. 

He started working as a seasonal park ranger for the National Park Service at Kitty Hawk while in college at Norfolk State University in 1977. As a seasonal ranger he was assigned to research the Wright brothers’ story and then tell it to visitors on a day in, day out basis all summer long. As far as he was concerned at the time, it was interesting work, but nothing special. That was before he understood the real story of the Wright brothers.

It was 1978 and the 75th anniversary of the Wright brothers’ Kitty Hawk flight. Historians Paul Garber of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., and Charles Gibbs Smith (a British Wright brothers expert) came to the Memorial to speak. “Garber was fascinating to listen to, but it was Smith who really opened my eyes and showed me the incredible impact that the first flight at Kitty Hawk had on the development of the world in the 20th century,” remembers Collins. 

Smith explained how that one seminal day shaped the way wars played out, super powers evolved, transportation progressed, and the world contracted in size during less than three-quarters of a century. In the lifetime of a man, inside of Orville Wright’s lifetime, aviation went from linen and spruce, pulleys and chains launched into head winds off a sand dune to the Bell X-1, a rocket-propelled plane dropped from the belly of an intercontinental bomber that flew to the other side of the seemingly impenetrable sound barrier. 

“Smith’s speech touched me, and I really became obsessed with the Wright brothers from then on,” Collins says. 

It took Collins another eight years to find a permanent position with the National Park Service at Kitty Hawk, but in that time he spent numerous hours researching Paul Garber’s data at the Smithsonian and learning about the Wright family and Orville and Wilbur’s contributions to aviation engineering. Everything he discovered added to his growing passion.

“The story of the Wright brothers’ pursuit of controlled, powered flight is actually about family values,” says Collins. “The key to the Wright brothers’ success was the closeness of their family and the way they were brought up. While they were children their parents instilled in them traits and characteristics that can still be instilled in children today. These are the character traits of hard work and dedication and the wherewithal to pursue their curiosity to its limits. 

“The Wright boys grew up in a loving family that gave them the kind of self-esteem and confidence they needed to carry out the research and developments they made. I like the story so much because I feel that there is something for everybody in the tale, no matter how old or how young you are,” he says. 

Collins is right. Orville and Wilbur’s parents and sister were all constantly involved in the brothers’ activities, encouraging them, supporting them, even traveling with them, recording data and always keeping the home fires burning back in Dayton. The story of controlled, powered flight was far from an instant success. If it were not for all the family support and the brothers’ dogged persistence in the face of failure after failure, they might not have had those successful hops on December 17, 1903, or quite possibly might not have been capable of sticking with their project until the world was convinced of the possibilities that could come of it. 

In 1984 Collins was hired as a permanent ranger at the Kitty Hawk site, with the official title of Historian, but it wasn’t until 1988 that the word got out about his storytelling talent. “I attended a presentation of the Wright Trophy in Washington, D.C., that year and did my interpretation of the Wright story for those present,” says Collins. After that the job really got interesting. 

“I’m kind of a ‘go here, go there’ guy and have been for many years,” he explains. He’s told his stories at aviation gatherings like EAA AirVenture and Sun ’n Fun, at Department of Interior pilot ground training in Alaska, and at a couple of FAA Air Safety seminars. 

During 2003, the centennial year for powered, controlled flight, Collins plans to do it all. The NPS will be the host to the celebration at the Kitty Hawk site, he explains. “We’ll supply the manpower and the infrastructure for the celebration, while the consortium of groups that make up the Centennial of Flight committee will actually plan and carry out many of the events,” he says. 

The U.S. Congress created the Centennial of Flight Commission in 1999 to serve as a national and international source of information about activities to commemorate the centennial of the Wright brothers’ first powered flight. The excitement in 2003 is scheduled to take place in North Carolina and in the Wright family’s hometown of Dayton, Ohio. Participants in the commemoration range from EAA’s Countdown to Kitty Hawk to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, the National Park Service, the First Flight Centennial Foundation, NASA, and the FAA, among others. 

The party will be big, and no one will be more satisfied with the attention the celebration receives than Collins. As far as he’s concerned, it’s about time the world finally gave those Wright boys the credit they deserve.

“Imagine this,” he says. “Time magazine in 2000 named some of the most important events of the 20th century, and sure enough, the Wright brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk made it into the lineup. I think they messed up, though,” he laughs. “Many of the other events set ahead of Kitty Hawk could not have happened if it were not for what transpired on December 17, 1903, on Kill Devil Hill. It has taken the events of September 11, 2001, to make us aware of how the world has changed and how aviation has played a part in that,” he says. Wars are now fought with aircraft and flying armaments making the first assault, and even delivering the coup de grâce. 

“I don’t believe that the Wright brothers have yet been honored the way that they should be honored for their achievements,” insists Collins. “If you go through a typical elementary or middle school text, you’ll find less than a page about the Wright brothers. There is no super aircraft carrier named after the Wright brothers, no NASA facility named after them,” he continues. And yet Collins is sure, from his research, that both Orville and Wilbur knew that their inventions and feats put them riding a cusp of world change. 

“In 1929, Orville said that, ‘Aviation has gone beyond my dreams.’ To me that shows me that both brothers were totally engulfed in the rapid evolution that their work created,” says Collins. That awareness sets the Wrights apart, he feels, from other inventors in their time. They were more like J. Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein in their vision than like Eli Whitney or Benjamin Franklin.

The Centennial of Flight Commission and Collins’ participation in the elaborately planned celebration should restart the historical record for credit in the direction where credit is due for the Wrights. This year and next participants can find information about the planned events online at www.centennialofflight.gov and EAA’s Countdown to Kitty Hawk website at www.countdowntokittyhawk.com. 

If you want to see and hear Darrell Collins weave stories into a living portrait of the Wrights and their trials, tribulations, and successes, come to EAA AirVenture 2002 (July 23-29). You’ll find him at the Countdown to Kitty Hawk pavilion with the experts from the Wright Experience, who are reverse-engineering the Wrights’ accomplishments to fully document the breadth of their genius. And he will be, as I first met him, talking about his favorite subject in front of the EAA AirVenture Museum’s replica Flyer.

If you’re like me and want to see the man and listen to his stories in their native element, you need to head east until you reach the North Carolina coastline and then swing out over a bridge to the Wright Brothers National Memorial. There you’ll find Darrell Collins standing before a replica of the Wright Flyer with movable controls, mesmerizing people from 9 to 5, Sunday through Thursday. Watch him do the Wright Boogie and see the wings of the Flyer twist. 
If your timing is good (and the weather is right), you may arrive at Kill Devil Hill to see the launch of EAA’s exact reproduction of the Wright Flyer at 10:35 a.m. on December 17, 2003. 

To this day no one other than Orville and Wilbur have made it fly because the machine didn’t survive its first day undamaged, and the Wrights didn’t repair it because they used what the Flyer taught them to move forward. Hyde hopes to at least duplicate one of the short hops the brothers managed that fateful day.