Photo from blog post "Kitty Hawk, A New Perspective" 11/14/17 Our blog, "Truth in Aviation History," has been a work in progress. And it continues to be. When we began our research a number of years ago, we never realized how many errors we would discover. It was like opening a Pandora's Box, chock full of aviation misinformation--provable "mis-history." I first cracked the lid when I began looking for answers to why a person as amazing as Glenn Hammond Curtiss , one of the most important aviation pioneers in history, would have so little mention in the many books I found. I might never have questioned this if he wasn't a cousin. The printed history smacked of a kind of mysterious bias or even collusion. There were shelves full of children's stories focused on the Wright Brothers, making certain that our youth believed the Wrights were the greatest pioneers, mainly because they were "the first to fly." That was accepted by all...
Unmasking Root In 1942, the Smithsonian Institution endorsed the Wrights as first to fly--and the first even capable of flying. Thirty four years later, Freedom of Information Laws revealed that a secret contract in 1948 had become part of the deal. In it, the Wright family dictated the wording of pertinent museum labels and forbade the Smithsonian from ever investigating the issue, however compelling the evidence might be to the contrary.. The bombshells kept coming. In 1978, highly respected Caltech (California Institute of Technology) in Pasadena analyzed the Wrights’ 1903 airplane, casting scientific doubts on many of the brothers’ claim...
We are taught in our history books that the Wright Brothers were the first to fly on December 17, 1903. The narrations about that day usually begin dramatically, something like this: "On a cold, windy day near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, the Wright brothers lifted off the sand in their small plane and became the first in the history of mankind to fly." Obviously there were manned flights before that in balloons, kites, and gliders. Man even made powered flights. So the definition of what the Wrights claimed that day was changed to be more precise: the Wrights were "the first to make a manned, powered, controlled, sustained flight in a heavier than air machine." But we're looking for truth in aviation history. How do we know the Wrights actually flew that day? Well, there were witnesses who were there, five of them. They were three life guards, John Daniels, Adam Etheridge, and Willie Dough, W.C.Brinkley, a farmer who was said to be beach combing, and Johnny Moor...
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