The Wright Brothers went to Kitty Hawk for the wind but they would have been blown away by conditions last week. The historic site of the first powered, sustained flight escaped undamaged when Hurricane Isabel made landfall on the Outer Banks. “There’s a little bit of standing water. We fared well,” National Parks Service spokeswoman Mary Doll told AVweb. “Wright Brothers (Memorial) really sustained no damage.” She said a couple of nearby airport runways were covered in sand washed in by the storm surge but they were quickly cleared. There was also some building damage in nearby communities. Of course, the hurricane played havoc with air travel on the east coast. Thousands of flights were cancelled, control towers were abandoned and some airports, including all the major facilities around Washington, D.C., closed as the storm bore down. Just to add to the chaos, a major storm front stretching from Minneapolis to Houston also caused weather delays across the middle part of the country. With power out in many locations and flood waters affecting many others, the Civil Air Patrol was helping the Air Force with its storm-management operations. The CAP volunteers were to be sent out to take aerial photos of damaged areas using new digital satellite imaging equipment recently installed on some of their planes.
