Wright Brothers Not First to Fly | Flying Magazine Thousands of books to re-write, or throw away. I've always known the Wrights were not the first to achieve powered flight, there were many others, but this is news to me regarding controlled powered flight. Of course I've also always thought the Wright flyer was not much of an airplane compared to the others at the time, and history proved this as well.
I love the wing design: Whitehead No. 21 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia No photos of it happening and I doubt it will ever be "officially" the first in flight.
Richard Pearce was previously the first IMO. As it was hard to share and validate news back then, and some like Richard did these things just for person interest, there will always be disputes. But I find it hard to understand why it has taken so long for this other flight to be shared, sounds like it was a big event ... weird. Pete
How is it that something so significant is just coming to light now? 112 years after the fact. Weird...very weird.
It's like the Chuck Yeager was the first to break the sound barrier thing... George Welch almost certainly did it first (twice) in an F-86 Sabre prototype. The second time was only an hour or so before the Yeager flight... Lacked 'proper' documentation.
