Fight o'er flight: how bickering and bungling brought down the statewide, yearlong centennial celebration of the Wrights' first flight.

• Author: Speizer, Irwin
• Position: Orville and Wilbur Wright

It's drilled into every Tar Heel school kid and stamped on license plates: North Carolina, first in flight. This is where Wilbur and Orville Wright taught the world to fly--those clumsy 12 seconds aloft Dec. 17, 1903--an event that resonates today, so much so that the state spent millions of dollars planning how to pay homage to its centennial.

The result will be a six-day celebration on the Outer Banks in December that will include a performance by singer Ray Charles, possible appearances by movie stars (John Travolta, a pilot, has been mentioned), flyovers by military jets and an attempt to recreate that first flight in a replica of the Wright Flyer. President Bush has been invited. "For the people of this community, it will be the grandest thing they have ever seen," promises Ken Mann, chairman of the North Carolina First Flight Centennial Commission, created to plan the celebration.

But with time running out, the commemoration is shaping up to be a shadow of what was envisioned. It was once promoted as a yearlong extravaganza that would touch nearly every corner of North Carolina with exhibits, air shows, seminars and celebrations and would leave behind a spiffy new visitor center at the Wright Brothers National Memorial in Kill Devil Hills. It was to end with a big bash there--a state-sized version of the nation's 1976 bicentennial party.

Despite spending $3.7 million of tax money from 1995 through the middle of last year--more than a fourth of it on salaries, benefits and travel--the commission has managed to keep few of those early promises. There is no new visitor center. There have been only a few events around the state, and the December celebration is limited to 30,000 people per day--about a fifth the number that attend a NASCAR race at Lowe's Motor Speedway in Concord. Spending is expected to reach $5 million by the end of this year, and critics complain of money squandered on consultants and staff and years of bickering. The missteps make it seem like something cooked up by The Man Will Never Fly Memorial Society, a satirical group--motto: "Birds fly, men drink"--that meets on the Outer Banks each December to dismiss aviation as a myth.

Humpy Wheeler, president of Speedway Motorsports Inc., which owns the Lowe's track and others around the country, understands what it takes to put on a major event. There are always roadblocks and turf battles, he says, though the Wright celebration seems to have had more than its share. Turnover on the Centennial Commission left no strong leader to steer it, which he says is crucial. "What happens to an event is that everybody that gets involved has an agenda. If you don't have an iron will somewhere in there, things really get chopped up."

Things got so dysfunctional that N.C. Department of Cultural Resources Secretary Lisbeth Evans, whose department oversees the commission, assumed a central role in 2002. "I'm not going to be naive and suggest there haven't been bumps along the way," she says. "When you say the event is going to be a be-all, end-all event, everybody is going to have a different idea of what that is. There was hype at the beginning, then the reality sets in."

She reined in organizers and planned for a more modest festival in December. Looking back, it seems clear that the state overestimated its ability to plan a major celebration with a politically appointed commission and may have overestimated the drawing power of a yearlong commemoration. Already there are warning signs about how well the December celebration might perform financially.

The largest public centennial event in North Carolina so far was an 11-day air show and celebration put on in May by a group in Fayetteville. Bad weather and...