Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Fortunately we didn't give up on flight after the early airplanes. Airplanes are not amenable to hackers designing them. Getting one to fly required a directed engineering effort, with a series of prototypes each targeted at solving a specific problem. I think it was the first such project that did so. The Wrights are often dismissed as "bicycle mechanics", but if you take a closer look they were very competent eng…
I would disagree. History is full of airplanes that were built or modified (sometimes improved) by hackers. There's an immensely successful experimental aircraft industry, and I'm not just talking about people who are (successfully) building human-scale vtol drones.
The FAA won't let you fly it until an engineer goes over your design. For very good reason.
An unbalanced airplane isn't going to fly, and one that isn't strong enough will fold up on you. There's a thin line between strong enough to hold together and light enough to get off the ground - and you cannot find that without math.
There were many hacker airplanes before the Wrights. They were all too heavy, too underpowered, too unstable, and too weak to fly. The Wrights, with math, solved those problems.