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...
Professor Samuel Pierpont Langley's 1903 Aerodrome . The saga of a pioneer plane--and the controversy surrounding its history Professor Langley The Langley Aerodrome, front wings in place, preparing for a launch. The Background In the fall of 1903, the head of the Smithsonian Institution, Professor Samuel Pierpont Langley, attempted to launch a heavier than air, man-carrying, powered plane. The launch failed, as did a subsequent attempt; and his machine, christened the “Aerodrome,” ignominiously fell into the river. Only days after Langley’s second try, the Wright brothers claimed that they successfully flew their own powered plane at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina We are embarking on a parallel blog to "Truth in Aviation History" in which we will search for the truth about the Langley/Wright story. The link will be provided. An examination of the current "history" must obviously include a look at the constant revisions of so-called "facts" by a...
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