Two brothers, bonded together by family, overcome sickness and ridicule to challenge the top thinkers of their day and accomplish what no one else could. Build a plane and fly it.

A seed is planted when their father Milton gives Wilbur and Orville a wind-up toy plane. Wilbur then takes a toy soldier and ties it to the planes’ cockpit and lets it fly. For a few glorious seconds it soars. And for the first time the boys imagine a day when humans will also fly.

Later, Wilbur and Orville Wright work for their father’s church newspaper and open a bicycle repair shop. Surprisingly, their mother is the one who teaches them engineering skills while their pastor father champions their unique career choice. The boys’ loving sister gives up career and marriage to serve her brothers as they fulfill their dream.

Sadly, their mother dies of tuberculosis in the middle of the boys’ struggle to find their niche in life. Wilbur has a serious accident that spirals into a chronic illness. He loses his ambition to attend college or do anything else. Orville works on the newspaper with his father to support the family. While sick, Wilbur devours book after book acquiring a broad education along the way. This rekindles his curiosity for how things work. When the boys re-discover the wind-up plane, it triggers their search for manned flight.

After failing to build a plane that flies, Wilbur and Orville create their own theories for flight and confront the world’s foremost aeronautic engineers at the Chicago Exposition. They inform the experts that the current formulas for flight are all wrong. Wilbur and Orville are allowed to share their new formulas but are quickly dismissed.

After battling the so-called experts, natural laws, multiple failures and their own doubts, the brothers finally fly the plane at Kitty Hawk that would change the world forever.