The fourth associate was Thomas Selfridge, a West Point graduate and the army’s foremost aeronautical expert. Bell had asked his friend, President Theodore Roosevelt, to dispatch Selfridge to the Bell summer home in Nova Scotia as an official observer for the War Department. Likeable and earnest, Selfridge was the nephew of two rear admirals and no stranger to demanding assignments, having commanded troops in San Francisco during the 1906 earthquake and fire.

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The association first set out to build a tetrahedral, man-carrying kite. Afterwards, Bell expected each associate in turn to construct a machine of his own design, with assistance from the other members. Bell wanted the group to further develop the tetrahedral, but he had a broader view as well. He aimed to make a practical flying machine of any design, one with such "inherent automatic stability" that he himself would be unafraid to fly in it.

In December 1907 the AEA took to the air in a strange craft called the Cygnet. More than 42 feet wide and 11 feet tall, it looked nothing like a Wright machine. It consisted of 3,393 individual cells, each resembling a small pyramid. Selfridge was the "pilot" of the unpowered craft. He lay flat in an open space in the center, with no control over the Cygnet’s flight other than what he could accomplish by shifting his weight. On the brisk morning of December 7, a steamer on Nova Scotia’s Bras d’Or Lake towed the Cygnet until it reached a height of 168 feet and remained aloft for more than seven minutes. As the kite descended to the lake, the red silk covering on the wings obscured Selfridge’s vision. Consequently he failed to release the towline in time and the craft collapsed as the steamer dragged it through the water. Still, Bell was ecstatic. The flight marked the inventor’s first success with a manned aircraft.

Developments in aviation prompted President Roosevelt to direct the War Department to solicit bids for a military aircraft. It did so in late 1907 with detailed specifications calling for a craft able to carry 350 pounds–including two passengers–and enough fuel for a 125-mile flight. The craft had to stay airborne for one hour and reach a speed of 40 miles per hour. Reflecting a nineteenth-century mindset, specifications required that the craft be easily disassembled for transport by wagon. This was the opportunity the Wrights had been waiting for. They submitted a proposal.

In the meantime, the Association turned its attention to biplanes. Bell granted Selfridge the privilege of spearheading the design of the group’s first airplane as a reward for risking his life in the Cygnet experiment. Selfridge wrote to the Wrights, asking for information on basic aerodynamics and wing construction, and the brothers politely wrote back with advice and recommended technical papers they had published and documents on file at the Patent Office. The association forged ahead and produced the Red Wing, named after the red silk–left over from the Cygnet–that covered the wings. On March 12, 1908, the Red Wing took to the air on a lake near Curtiss’s home in Hammondsport, New York. Selfridge was away on military duty, so Baldwin flew the plane, gliding across the ice on sledge runners and then soaring more than 300 feet before crashing back down to the ice. It was the first successful public flight of a flying machine in the United States.

The AEA christened its next design the White Wing and incorporated great improvements over its predecessor. Instead of sledges, the plane had wheels. Even more important, it employed ailerons, small, hinged surfaces at each wing tip that allowed the pilot to control the plane’s roll, or lateral movement, and make banked turns. The Wrights controlled their airplanes with wing warping, in which steel wires controlled by the pilot twisted the wings in opposite directions. As far as the Wrights were concerned, ailerons used the same principle as wing warping and infringed on their patent. When Scientific American incorrectly reported that the AEA was offering to sell copies of the White Wing, the Wrights were outraged. "Curtiss et al. are using our patents, I understand, and are now offering machines for sale at $5000 each, according to Scientific American," Orville wrote to Wilbur. "They have got good cheek!"

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