Dayton Audioguides

Wilbur and Orville Wright ran a bicycle repair shop on West Third Street in Dayton, and it was in that shop -- and in the open fields at Huffman Prairie east of the city -- that they worked out the problems of powered flight between 1899 and 1905. The world knows Kitty Hawk, where the first flight happened in December 1903. Dayton is where they actually figured out how to fly, in hundreds of practice circuits over a cow pasture. The Wright-Dunbar Village neighborhood preserves the area around the original bicycle shop, and the Carillon Historical Park holds a replica of the Wright Flyer III, the first practical aircraft, in the building where the brothers stored it.

The National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is the world's largest military aviation museum, free to enter, covering four enormous hangars of aircraft from the early Wright era through the Space Shuttle.

It is genuinely one of the most impressive museums in the American Midwest and is consistently underestimated by travelers who assume military aviation museums are niche interests. The Oregon District, Dayton's arts and entertainment neighborhood, holds bars and restaurants in 19th-century brick storefronts and maintains a lively street life particularly on weekend evenings.