What did Orville Wright say after his last flight, aboard a Constellation?

During the test campaign of the XC-69 prototype, the military Constellation that Lockheed was building for the US Army Air Forces, the aircraft landed at Wright Field, in Ohio, to pick up a very special guest: Orville Wright, the pioneer who, together with his brother Wilbur, had made the first powered flight. That trip aboard Lockheed's four-engine aircraft was the last flight of his life.

During the flight he was allowed to take the controls of the aircraft for a few moments. His remark has become one of the most-quoted anecdotes in the Constellation's history: the wingspan of that aircraft was greater than the distance covered on his first flight. The comparison neatly sums up how far aviation had come within a single lifetime, from a machine of wood and fabric that barely left the ground to a pressurized four-engine airliner designed to cross continents with dozens of passengers.

The XC-69 and the first C-69s spent those months on all kinds of demonstrations and trials. The seventh C-69 flew to Fairbanks, Alaska, to be tested under arctic conditions, and the third one covered a New York-to-Paris route on August 14, 1945, in under 15 hours, with a TWA crew, demonstrating its ability to cross the Atlantic. The prototype ended up converted into the XC-69E, an engine test bed with four Pratt & Whitney R-2800s. As the end of the war approached, the C-69 lost importance for the war effort, and almost all the aircraft built were eventually converted into L-049 passenger airliners for the airlines.