Surfman John T. Daniels in an interview with Collier's Weekly, September 17, 1927:
We knew that they were going to fly, but we didn’t know what was going to happen when they did.
We had watched them for several years and seen how they figured everything out before they attempted it. We had seen the glider fly without an engine, and when those boys put an engine in it we knew that they knew exactly what they were doing.
Adam Etheridge, Will Dough, W.C. Brinkley, Johnny Moore and myself were there on the morning of December 17th. We were a serious lot. Nobody felt like talking.
Wilbur and Orville walked off from us and stood close together on the beach, talking low to each other for some time. After a while they shook hands, and we couldn’t help notice how they held on to each other’s hand, sort ’o like they hated to let go; like two folks parting who weren’t sure they’d ever see each other again.
Orville climbed into the machine, the engine was started up and we helped steady it down the monorail until it got under way. The thing went off with a rush and left the rail as pretty as you please, going straight out into the air maybe 120 feet when one of its wings tilted and caught in the sand, and the thing stopped.
We got it back up on the hill again, and this time Wilbur got in. The machine got a better start this time and went off like a bird. It flew near about a quarter of a mile, but was flying low, and Wilbur must have miscalculated the height of a sand ridge just where he expected to turn, and the rudder hit the sand. He brought the plane down, and we dragged it back to the hill again.
They were going to fix the rudder and try another flight when I got my first—and, God help me—my last flight.
A breeze that had been blowing about twenty-five miles an hour suddenly jumped to thirty-five miles or more, caught the wings of the plane, and swept it across the beach just like you’ve seen an umbrella turned inside out and loose in the wind. I had hold of an upright of one of the wings when the wind caught it, and I got tangled up in the wire that held the thing together.
The machine was a total reck. The Wrights took it to pieces, packed it up in boxes and shipped it back to their home in Dayton. They gave us a few pieces for souvenirs, and I have a piece of the upright that I had hold of when it caught me up and blew away with me.
http://www.smithsonianeducation.org/...ght/wright.pdf (p.11)