Lay down in a cradle and squirm (no kidding) for roll-control — crudely warping the wings for effect. While sprawled in the wing-cradle, craning your neck up to see ahead, try and see where you're going when the horizontal stabilizers and elevators (two of each) block your view, especially at critical moments.

Lumbering control response, at best. Narrow range of maneuver and control; exercise the plane outside that very confining box, and bad things quickly begin to happen.

Hope that vibration from the wildly complex engine/chain-drive/drive-shaft/dual-giant-propellers arragement doesn't cause it all to come apart or become uncontrollable (a broken prop, fouled in the Wright's rigging & chain drive, led to the first fatal airplane crash).

Take off and land (semi-crash) on skids, rather than wheels. And crashing very, very ill-advised, as the heaviest parts of the airplane (scorching-hot engine and steaming radiator, and giant whirling props) were behind you, waiting to rip loose from the fragile airframe, and hammer you from behind at whatever the speed of impact.

Arguably, they were typical of the horrible beasts of early aviation, though the Wrights foolishly clung to essentially this same monstrosity well into 1909, by which time several European (especially French) and some American designs had apparently surpassed it in sophistication and safety.

Not until the Frenchman Louis Bleriot crafted together (from others' ideas) the first practical airplane — his Bleriot XI monoplane — did aviation (arguably) get a decent flyable, semi-ergonomic airplane: joystick for pitch (elevators) and roll (ailerons, eventually, rather than the wing-warping it started with); rudder foot-bar (essentially about the same function and feel as rudder pedals, which evolved therefrom).

The Bleriot XI pilot sat upright in an enclosed cockpit, safely behind the engine — an air-cooled radial engine to which the single, compact propeller was properly, directly bolted — minimizing the Wright's drive-train extravagances that made minor problems unnecessarily spectacular and tragic.

Landings and takeoffs were on wheeled undercarriage — two main wheels and a tailwheel (the shape of things to come for generations)
. The landing gear main wheels were mounted on shock-absorbers and "trailing arm" suspension — permitting smooth landings and takeoffs. It's a design concept so advanced that it's one of the emerging design "advances" in today's jet aircraft.

The Bleriot, though, was still no easy plane to fly, owing largely to lift-generating horizontal tail* and short wings giving twitchy roll response.
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(*Modern airplanes have a center of gravity forward of the center of the wing, causing the nose to be heavy; today's horizontal tails generate NEGATIVE (downward) lift on the tail, causing the plane to pivot on the wing, lifting the nose; during an aerodynamic stall (when the wing stops generating lift because the wing is at too steep a nose-up angle; the collapse of wing lift, and the forward center-of-gravity causes the nose to drop, regaining the correct flying angle. On the original Bleriot XI, attempts at more-efficient flight, generating lift with the horizontal tail, required that the center of gravity be BEHIND the center of the wing, allowing some of the plane's weight to be carried by the horizontal tail. But if such a plane's pitch became too steep, and the wing stalled, the aft-placed center of gravity could cause the airplane to fall backwards, or simply sink flat, exacerbating the problem, and possibly prevent any recovery before crashing.)
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These shortcomings notwithstanding, the Bleriot was sufficiently advanced that it enabled Bleriot to become the first flyer to cross the English Channel — the first successful airplane flight between countries, and the first over open sea — making the Bleriot a global icon of airplane "perfection."

Couple the world fame of this event with the Bleriot's superiority by comparison to its peers — a rather simple and elegant design, and extremely practical for its time — and one sees easily why the Bleriot (not the Wright) became the first truly mass-produced airplane (over 1,000 manufactured and sold, plus hundreds of "knock-off" copies by imitators from all over the world, including America's Clyde Cessna (the first two "Cessna" airplanes were Bleriot imitations).

The practical Bleriot airplane, not the Wright Flyer, set most of the early "firsts" and records of early avaition, and set the design standard that would ultimately be the basic form factor (internally and externally) of nearly all airplanes for a generation.

Dick Rutan, by the way, was not a designer or engineer but a pilot; it was his brother Burt you're thinking of, who I've known since the early 1970s…

The Seamew gave aerobatic displays at Farnborough. On one occasion there were four of them putting on a good show.

I remember the early flights were made with small indicator tabs all over the wings. (Like the flags you might add to a birthday cake.) Clearly there was something going on that they wanted to understand.

I later met a draughtsman, who did the drawings for fitting the engine into the airframe, he said they made a mockup to work out the routings of the pipes and wiring. They just could not work it out any other way.

I have imagined what Dick Rutan would have designed. Now there's a thought.

I now realize that you must have only read the article on line, where it indeed had only one photo. I was referring to the article in the magazine, which was fully illustrated. Sorry for the confusion on my part.