As the great-great-grandnephew of Orville and Wilbur Wright looked on, the Museum of Flight yesterday announced it had acquired one of three exact reproductions of the 1903 Wright Flyer — the first powered airplane the famous brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, N.C.

Purchased for $1 million, about what it cost Warrenton, Va.-based Wright Experience to build it, the flyer will join a collection of other Wright-related memorabilia at the museum, on the Boeing campus in South Seattle.

Museum Chairman Bruce McCaw yesterday said the flyer, expected to arrive at the museum in late April, "will be right at home" there.

The museum also holds a compendium of the Wright Brothers' business records, what McCaw called "the birth certificate of the aviation industry," photographic negatives documenting Wilbur Wright's triumphant 1908 flights in Le Mans, France, as well as reproductions of the brothers' earlier gliders.

McCaw said the collection, "will help us properly support both public exhibits and scholarly research of the Wright Brothers."

The acquisition came after more than a year of negotiations.

The brothers' great-grandniece, Janette Yoerg, is on the board of the Discovery of Flight Foundation of Warrenton, Va., which contributed to the museum's purchase of the flyer.

Yesterday, she spoke with pride about the legacy of her uncles.

"Uncle Wilbur and Uncle Orville invented this plane and then they worked hard to perfect it and then spent a lot of time defending their legacy," said Yoerg, who lives in Edina, Minn. "Our family has an obligation to make sure the world understands their genius."

Her son, Keith Yoerg, a ninth-grader, was inspired by his uncles to aim high. He wants to someday become an astronaut.

"I always knew it was there. It never hit me until the 95th anniversary at Kitty Hawk when I saw all that stuff — the flyovers and airplanes — and I thought, wow, this is awesome. That's when I really got interested in my heritage."

His mother said the legacy is passed down from generation to generation.

"My grandmother was the first American child in an airplane," Yoerg said. "She heard they took up a little girl in France and asked if they could take her up in a plane."

It took about two years for The Wright Experience to make an authentic reproduction of the flyer using the same equipment and materials — even down to the fabric — as the original aircraft.

Paul Glenshaw, president of the foundation, pointed out there was one inauthentic element on the sister ship of the museum's flyer — the one that flew in the Centennial of Flight celebration in 2003 in North Carolina.

It was a 17-channel flight-data record that, he said, "didn't alter the performance but recorded what we did. We think Orville and Wilbur would have approved."

It cost the brothers about $1,000 to build the plane; it cost Wright Experience between $1 million and $1.2 million, said President Ken Hyde.

"Our goal is to understand and rediscover the secrets of the Wright brothers to inspire a new generation," he said.

Lornet Turnbull: 206-464-2420 or lturnbull@seattletimes.com