Neil Armstrong’s son part of milestone flight of Wright brothers replica plane

The son of Neil Armstrong will take the 5,000th flight of a replica of the Wright brothers first production airplane.

The milestone Oct. 26 flight of the Wright B Flyer involving Mark Armstrong will be at 10 a.m. Dayton-Wright Brothers Airport in Miami Twp., according to the National Aviation Heritage Area.

Mark Armstrong is the youngest son of the Wapakoneta native who was the first man to walk on the moon. A pilot for the flight will be announced later, the National Aviation Heritage Area said in a statement issued Thursday.

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The event will include Amanda Wright Lane, great grandniece of Orville and Wilbur Wright.

The flight will come nearly 12 years after Neil Armstrong – a longtime Lebanon-area resident - flew as honorary aviator of the plane at DWB on Dec. 1, 2007, a day he gave an encore performance, officials said.

“He went up for about half an hour and stopped back in the hangar, drank some coffee to warm up and then said ‘Let’s go again!’ ” according to Don Adams, special events coordinator at the Wright B Flyer Museum.

“It was very, very cold that day but he really enjoyed his flight and was able to fly the Wright B Flyer himself,” Adams added.

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The Armstrong family’s links to Orville and Wilbur Wright date back at least to the 1969 moon landing. Commanding the Apollo 11 mission, Neil Armstrong took fragments of the Wright brothers’ 1903 flyer took to the moon and back.

Mark Armstrong graduated from Stanford University with a bachelor’s degree in physics. He has had a 30-year software engineering career during which he has been a senior engineering leader for both Symantec and Microsoft, and writing software for Apple Computer, according to the National Aviation Heritage Area.

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