Smart water..........him and his friend...........Alex G. Bell.........who has a place in Georgetown.........the Volta house or something similar....................doing drones into the Potomac............

Langley had no effective way of addressing the Wright brothers' central innovation of controlling an airplane too big to be maneuvered by the weight of the pilot's body. So if the Aerodrome had flown stably, as the models did, Manly would have been in considerable danger when the machine descended, uncontrolled, for a landing—especially if it had wandered away from the river and over solid ground.

Air and sea craft, facilities, a unit of solar radiation, and an award have been named in Langley's honor, including:

First failure of the manned Aerodrome, Potomac River, Oct. 7, 1903

• Langley Gold Medal by the Smithsonian Institution^[10]
• NASA Langley X-43A Hyper-X
• NASA Langley Research Center (NASA LaRC), Hampton, Virginia^[11]
• Langley Air Force Base
• Langley Hall at the University of Pittsburgh
• Langley High School in Pittsburgh
• Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory
• Langley unit of solar radiation
• Mount Langley in the Sierra Nevada
• USS Langley (CV-1)
• USS Langley (DE‑131), laid down 10 July 1942 and renamed Hammann on 1 August 1942
• USS Langley (CVL-27)
• Seadrome Langley, intended as one in a chain of Atlantic aviation way-stations, cancelled due to the Depression
• SS Samuel P. Langley, U.S. Liberty Ship