It was August 22, 1901, and Orville and Wilbur Wright were on a train from Kitty Hawk, NC, back to their home on 7 Hawthorn Street in Dayton. The brothers were dejected after further glider testing on the dunes produced more questions than answers. Nothing was making sense and even gracious insight from French-American engineer and aviation authority Octave Chanute — considered by many the world’s foremost authority on aeronautics — led to few revelations and more bouts of failure.  The Wrights were at an impasse: either the challenge of conquering powered flight was beyond their wisdom and they didn’t know what they didn’t know, or assumptions being made from the guidance of more esteemed minds were false assumptions leading to the endless circle of confusion.  As the train ride continued on, Wilbur confided to his brother:

“…not within a thousand years will man ever fly…”

Self-doubt is human nature but the greatest thinkers overcome the demons through a maniacal stubbornness.  Orville and Wilbur understood that yaw, pitch, and roll were the three pillars of aeronautics.  Include altitude and air speed and that’s pretty much 99% of powered flight.  A delicate balance must take place to make it all work.  Too much of one and not enough of others usually leads to loss of control and catastrophic failure.

This was the unsolved puzzle that kept mankind in mental tatters for hundreds of years in the pursuit of flying like the birds.  In 1480, Leonardo da Vinci sketched his famous aerial screw. Others followed with their own fantastical ideas and contraptions.  The physics challenge felt like dancing on the head of a needle and the Wright Brothers knew all too well that the most accomplished aeronautical minds in the world had tackled the problem with little progress.  These personalities were educated men trained in the sciences with fancy degrees, commendations, titles, published works, blessings from nobility, valuable grants from governments and prestigious research institutions, and the full faith and respect of peers that paid to hear their roaring lectures.

Orville and Wilbur had none of those credentials and deciding whether to invest in themselves or the prevailing wisdom was the source of never-ending frustration. They were part-time publishers and full-time bicycle mechanics without endorsements of any kind — even high school diplomas.  It didn’t help that Dayton, OH, wasn’t exactly next door to the Smithsonian Institution or National Geographic where tons of financing flooded more esteemed inventors intent on solving the unsolvable question of their time.  As the Wrights fabricated bicycle frames by day, their nights were overwhelmed with tinkering curiosity that made up for a lack of book smarts with old-fashioned, Midwestern spit and glue.

The brothers built gliders and airfoils to test the properties of lift. It seems elementary now, but 125 years ago even this problem proved mostly unresolved. The Wrights did well to answer it however and did so only after realizing their own experiments and calculations contrasted with data from the smartest aeronautical authorities in the world.  Humble as they were, the first inclination was to throw out their own data as improperly gathered with flaws and oversights by mere amateurs.  After testing hundreds of different wing shapes however, the best foils with the best lift were the ones they created using calculations only they discovered.  All the prior data from the smartest people in the world were nothing more than tables of bogus intel — some of them presumed correct for over a century.  From this moment forward, the Wrights trusted themselves and looked upon others with respectful skepticism.

Wright Airfoil Research

Detailed Drawings and Calculations (Source: BYU Design Review)

Anthony Grant and his coaching staff have been on a similar glidepath of self-awareness this season, searching for the right data sets to put the Flyers in a position to succeed.  Like the Wright airfoils, it’s been a slow death march of endless trial and error.  What’s worked one night has failed the next and prior failures were sometimes recycled into newfound success.  Input and output have been in a constant state of chaos and though experimentation is still ongoing, measurable trends have emerged.

Dayton has tried playing fast, slow, half-court, full-court, with short rotations, hockey-line substitutions, tinkered with starting lineups, leaned more heavily on veterans, rolled the dice with youngsters, and monkeyed around with set pieces and matchup priorities dictated by opposing personnel.  The coaching staff has collected an endless amount of data over the long arc of the 2024-25 season, but the findings remain hit or miss heading into the A10 Tournament in Washington, DC, on Friday.  Perhaps the intel was all wrong and UD shoved square pegs into round holes. Perhaps the data was self-evident but coaching and player blind spots failed to see the answers hiding in plain sight.  It’s been maddening at times, but if there’s one variable that’s been relatively constant in the chaos, it’s effort. When Dayton plays hard, miscalculations elsewhere don’t crash the glider but lead to soft landings.  When the Flyers demonstrate little urgency in their work however, the result usually nosedives into the Huffman dirt or Kitty Hawk sand.   For the Flyers to truly find themselves and put their best foot forward in DC, they’ll need to lean into the portion of data that’s constant and throw out the parts that lead to unpredictable outcomes.  If it was good enough for the Wrights, it’s good enough for the Flyers.

After the brothers trusted in their own aeronautical expertise, solving the impossible question suddenly turned improbable but possible by investing fully in themselves. With lift essentially conquered, only power and control were left to master. The Wrights set aside power as the third and final obstacle because they deemed it the easiest to overcome; they would eventually build their own powerplant after trying and failing to buy an engine to their own specifications. In the meantime, sustained control occupied their full attention and proved to be the most difficult challenge of the three-legged stool.  Banking and turning the aircraft was true flying, not arrow-shooting targets at the mercy of perfect weather conditions and topological assist.  The Wrights grew frustrated at the lack of progress; they knew what was happening but didn’t fully understand why.  When attempting to turn the glider, the inside wing would dip and lose lift while the outside wing offered no compensation.  The men determined that air attacking the wings upon turn-in changed angles and pressure, leading to less lift and more drag.  With a newfound understanding of why, the next task was overcoming the how.

Further experimentation translated to additional testing at Huffman Prairie and Kitty Hawk.  For a while the progress headed nowhere. Other aeronautical pioneers tried to create flying machines that mimicked the birds: large and heavy contraptions of flapping wings strapped to the body that often resulted in serious injury or death. The prevailing wisdom at the time was in order to change direction, one must shift weight to unbalance the flying machine and forcibly torque a turn. Wilbur also studied the birds, but by 1900 concluded that while birds offered the answer, the answer hid elsewhere, overlooked, in plain sight :

“….my observations of the flight of birds convince me that birds use more positive and energetic methods of regaining equilibrium than that of shifting the center of gravity…they regain their lateral balance…by a torsion of the tips of the wings. If the rear edge of the right wing tip is twisted upward and the left downward the bird becomes an animated windmill and instantly begins to turn, a line from its head to its tail being the axis…”

And with that, the concept of wing-warping was born.  The Wrights affixed cables to the inside and outside leading edges of the wings, bending them in countering directions to offset one wing’s loss of lift with another wing’s advancing lift.  They figured out how to dance on the head of a pin and resolved the second of three challenges.  Wright Cycle Shop mechanic Charlie Taylor built the engine that later powered the flying machine — the first engine he ever built — and the world changed on December 17, 1903.  Wing-warping was eventually phased out for ailerons to eliminate stress on the airframe but the physics remained the same.

Wright Glider, Kitty Hawk, NC. (Oct. 24, 1902)

Demonstration of wing-warping. Notice the different angle of attack of the leading edges of the inside and outside wings. (Source: Wikipedia)

Dayton basketball is at the precipice of that same final question to achieve legitimate flight in the A10 Tourney and — potentially — March Madness. They know what works and what doesn’t, but must be disciplined enough to lean exclusively into the certainties.  Only when the Wrights trusted their own intel over the noise of others did they go from amateur tinkerers to global icons.

What have the data sets revealed for Grant and his players?  Regardless of how many three-pointers, free throws, assists, or fouls occur, UD succeeds when effort is equal to or exceeds execution.  That was the case on Friday night in the victory over VCU at the Siegel Center.  The Flyers were butchered on the glass, didn’t get to the foul line as much as they hoped, and missed a ton of shots in the first half, but scrapped hard despite the shortcomings and found a way to make just enough big plays at the end to earn the win.  Sometimes it’s a matter of losing a preponderance of the battles yet winning the war with a couple clean uppercuts. Dayton is a team of questionable depth, inside scoring, size, and defensive prowess. All those things were true on Friday night but didn’t stop the Flyers from winning against the #25 team in the nation on their home court — a court the Rams had not suffered defeat all season. This is the same Flyer team that got blown out at St. Bonaventure and George Washington, and lost a nightmarish game at UMass.  The common thread in those defeats was a lack of effort and urgency.  Fans could see the poor body language in the opening minutes.

For Dayton to have a chance this weekend, they must focus on the things that keep the plane in the air and leave the style points to the naysayers.  UD is going to miss open shots, get out-jumped for rebounds, and find it difficult at times to keep teams from scoring. Some of the flaws aren’t magically going away, but the strengths don’t have to either.  There’s enough good parts to survive and advance: getting steals, drawing fouls, making a few treys, grabbing all the loose balls, and winning the war of physical attrition over three games in three days.  That’s what the data says and that’s where success awaits.   There was nothing sexy about the Wright Flyer; an amalgam of wood, muslin, pulleys, and wires.  It looked nothing like the flying machine all the great minds of their day envisioned.  It was form following function, focused on solving the impossible challenge of dancing yaw, pitch, roll, altitude, and attitude on the head of a needle.  Like Orville and Wilbur, the Flyers must perform above their pay grade and do some of that same dancing to do some dancing in the field of 68.  Self-doubt is part of the life cycle of progress: the brothers were 16 months from changing the world despite a confidence level 1,000 years removed.

Impossible? No. Improbable? Highly. Dayton has never won an A10 Tournament away from UD Arena, a drought that extends three decades.  UD is not the favorite nor is it the best Flyer team to end the dry spell.  It’s been a strange season however with volcanic highs and canyon-carving lows. An NCAA at-large bid might also still be in play.  Perfect conditions of wind, fair skies, and atmospheric pressure might be prerequisites to get the ugly bird off the ground.

That’s the lift part.  All that’s left is power and control.