Orville and Wilbur Wright, bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, spend years testing gliders on the dunes at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, before their powered aircraft, the Wright Flyer, leaves the ground on December 17, 1903, for twelve seconds. This NOVA episode follows modern aviation enthusiasts and engineers who build working replicas of the Wrights' early gliders and airplanes to test, by flying them, whether the brothers' original designs actually behave the way the historical record claims. Their reconstructions expose just how unstable and difficult to control those first machines were, and how much of the Wrights' achievement was not the engine but the wing-warping control system they invented to keep an aircraft steady in the air. The film moves between period photographs and drawings from the Wrights' own experiments and present-day test flights, letting the replica builders explain, crash by crash, what earlier attempts at powered flight got wrong. The result is less a celebration than a working reconstruction of an engineering problem, solved twice, over a century apart.