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Summary:Flight before the Wright brothers demonstrated their powered man–carrying flying machine was based on the philosophy of vehicles with high inherent stability combined with pilots whose only duty was to steer. This combination resulted in low controllability and poor manoeuvrability, with a strong response to the disturbances of rough air. The Wright brothers broke with the high–inherent–stability concept and combined inherently unstable aircraft with three–axis control operation by human pilots to achieve stable flight systems with good controllability and good manoeuvrability. This change from inherently stable to inherently unstable aircraft was the basic contribution made by the Wright brothers to start the age of flight.In this paper, a picture of the state of flight control before the Wright brothers is built up from references to the literature. A similar picture is drawn for flight control developments after the Wright brothers, and the effect of their efforts on the progress of events is discussed. Plots with time as the independent variable and non–dimensional ordinates are used to illustrate the overall pattern of past developments in flight control and to indicate the course of future progress.

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