That's a funny example, given that the Wright brothers were overwhelmingly empirical compared to their competitors and succeeded as a result, because the foundation of aerodynamics was fundamentally flawed at the time. In a real sense, those systems were built from empirical observations, and most human systematizing happens post-hoc.

I agree that formalizing observations into a system can lead to additional insights, though it would probably be hubris to assume the formalization is faultless.